BUFFALO — So now it appears as if the Rangers will be in a fight to the finish to make the playoffs, and all because they simply don’t have any . . . finish, that is.
Coach John Tortorella ripped his team for a lack of desperation following last night’s 1-0 defeat to the Sabres that dropped the Blueshirts a tie-breaker behind Buffalo into eighth place and left the club only three points up on the ninth-place Hurricanes with five games to go. But the fact is the Rangers have scored a total of three goals in their last four games.
Indeed, last night represented the team’s third 1-0 game of its last four, though the first that it has lost. The other game was a 2-1 shootout defeat to Ottawa at the Garden last Thursday in which the work ethic was questioned by the coach and players, alike.
“You can’t play a Game 77 like it’s a Game 25, and that’s what we did for the first 40 minutes,” Tortorella said last night. “They were more desperate than we were.
“Why, I don’t know, but the first two periods were unacceptable.”
So can the Rangers have an identity as a hard-working team and be outworked twice in three games? Doesn’t make any sense, does it?
The Rangers mustered 19 shots on rookie Jhonas Enroth, who made the start in place of the injured Ryan Miller, but the goaltender was tested so rarely, Gerry Desjardins could have been in nets for the Sabres, and he turns 57 in July.
Tim Connolly scored the game’s lone goal, beating Henrik Lundqvist with a power-play rocket from the left side at 5:24 of the second period after the Rangers had an apparent Artem Anisimov score waved off 2:02 into the match when referee Chris Rooney ruled that Ryan Callahan had made incidental contact with the goaltender.
“It was the right call,” said Tortorella, though his players were not so sure.
Lundqvist was hobbling after a save on Chris Butler with 25 seconds remaining in the second when it appeared the shot hit The King directly on the right knee after his pad had slipped. After finishing the game without incident, the goaltender, “under orders from above,” not to identify the problem, nevertheless said, “I’ll be fine,” for tonight’s match at the Coliseum against the Islanders.
Tortorella switched his line combinations a couple of times, elevating Sean Avery, flipping Anisimov and Brian Boyle for a stretch, sitting Brandon Prust and Ruslan Fedotenko for shifts while benching Erik Christensen and Wojtek Wolski for long stretches.
“When you win you can live with it, but on a night like tonight, it’s frustrating,” said Boyle, who has scored one goal in the last 14 games. “The onus falls on the guys who aren’t producing.”
The onus falls on this feast-and-famine club (17 goals in the three games before this drought) to get to the net and bury pucks. They also have to skate and draw more than the single power play they earned in this one.
“I don’t think we came out and played as hard as we needed to,” Dubinsky said. “We didn’t play it like it was a playoff game.”
It’s easy to blame lack of urgency for a failure to score, but not everyone agreed that effort rather than execution was lacking.
“I don’t think we lost this game because we were outworked,” Callahan told The Post. “Not at all.”
Onto the Island.