The Rangers played last night’s game against the Penguins in waves. In the end, the troughs far outweighed the crests, the result being a 4-1 loss in front of a sold-out Madison Square Garden.
“Our team has to understand if you’re going to have a record like we have, teams are going to start looking for you,” coach John Tortorella said about his team, which still remains in first place in the Eastern Conference (29-13-4). “You’ve got to be ready to play and we weren’t.”
Though they have rolled for much of the first half of this season — to the point where they were recently lauded by their owner James Dolan as being close to winning a Stanley Cup — the Rangers have lost three of their past five games, the first time they’ve done that all season. It’s far from being a streak that will cause a panic, but at this point it at least has the coach’s fiery attention.
“I guess we’re used to those five-game winning streaks and those seven-game winning streaks, and it’s not going to be easy,” Tortorella said. “It’s going to be a grind through [these] couple months. I think our players understand that.”
The biggest and most damning part of the game was the third period, a time when the Rangers have excelled. Instead, they made some defensive reads that Tortorella called “brain-dead,” most notably a pinch by defenseman Marc Staal 2:23 in that resulted a three-on-one goal from Richard Park.
Five minutes later, Staal, who played a season-high 26:02 in his ninth game back from a concussion, whiffed for a puck at his feet, giving it to Evgeni Malkin for a slick backhanded goal, followed by Malkin’s seventh goal in the past four games, an empty-netter.
“Don’t beat the [bleep] out of the team, because they played hard,” Tortorella said. “We made some major mental mistakes in the third period that cost us the game. Do we play the full 60 minutes? No. Our strength is hammering those third periods and we didn’t get it done tonight.”
It also didn’t help that the team started so slow. Nine minutes into the game, the Rangers didn’t have a shot on goal and they were down 1-0 on a rebound wrist shot from Chris Kunitz.
“They’re a quick team,” said goalie Henrik Lundqvist, who made his 34th start of the season and recorded his third loss in his past four games, giving up 10 goals during that stretch. “They’re a good transition team and they have some skill guys up front.”
During the second period the Rangers came out and played hard, controlling the tempo of the game and tying it up when rookie speedster Carl Hagelin scored his eighth of the season on a breakaway resulting from a great backhanded, cross-ice flip by Marian Gaborik.
“We gathered ourselves and I think we controlled the game through the second period,” Tortorella said. “And they fed it to us in the third.”
Now the Rangers head to Boston tomorrow to take on the defending Stanley Cup champions. They are unquestionably the Rangers’ most formidable foe in the East.
“The important thing is that we get over this,” captain Ryan Callahan said. “It’s now about how we respond.”