NHL

Rangers’ Gaborik scores 20th goal, leads NHL

Now it’s 20 goals for Rangers forward Marian Gaborik and a share of the NHL lead with Steven Stamkos and Jonathan Toews after finishing Artem Anismov’s brilliant feed off a left circle faceoff victory against Frans Nielsen at 7:52 of the second period in last night’s 4-2 Garden victory over the Islanders.

“It just feels good to be contributing and helping the team win,” said Gaborik, who beat Michael Grabner to the net off Anisimov’s creative, clean victory for his 10th goal in his past 12 games. “We’re really clicking with Artie and Step [Derek Stepan], so hopefully we can keep it up.”

Gaborik has scored 20 or more goals in eight his 10 NHL seasons in which he has played at least 20 games.

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The Rangers had been struggling on faceoffs for the five games entering the match to such an extent that coach John Tortorella on Wednesday had said, “Forget about the clean win, we just have to try to go for the tie, center against center and scramble it.”

The issues at the dots persisted through the first period during which the Rangers won just six of 19. And the problems persisted for Brad Richards, who went 0-5 after having won just 30 of 90 over the preceding give games following his first 26 matches in which he had gone 215-190 (53.1 percent).

But it turned dramatically over the last two periods for both the Rangers, who went 29-15 over the final 40 minutes and for Richards, who went 12-2 in the second and third.

Anisimov, who uncharacteristically did not want to talk following the match, was 2-2 on the draws.

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The linesmen seemed to miss a blatant icing infraction on a Mike Mottau shoot-in with 3:25 to go and the Rangers protecting a 3-2 lead. Andy McDonald picked up the puck behind the net after a bewildered John Mitchell touched it and then attempted a jam play against Martin Biron, who alertly made the save.

“At that point I wasn’t concerned why it wasn’t icing, I was just getting ready for the faceoff,” Biron said.

Mitchell sealed the game with an empty-netter from the neutral zone at 18:27 just as Evgeni Nabokov got to the Islanders’ bench after vacating the net before his team crossed the Rangers line. The Rangers, who went 0-for-3 on the power play including two failures in the third, have fallen into a 1-for-14 funk over the last five matches. Penalty-killers allowed two power play goals in three times short, marking just the third time this year the club allowed two in a match, the first since Nov. 19 in Montreal but the second time in three games against the Islanders.

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Ruslan Fedotenko, now a fourth-line center, played just 5:32, including 56 seconds in the third period while linemate Michael Rupp got 6:20 of ice including 1:34 in the third. The Tim ErixonStu Bickel third pair got two shifts in the third period while Dan Girardi was on for 11:43 in the third, 28:07 for the match.