PHILADELPHIA — The Rangers were never able to establish their game yesterday against the best and deepest team in the East, beaten 4-1 by the Flyers after an uncharacteristic sloppy performance during which it was all but impossible to identify the Blueshirts’ best players.
They turned the puck over way too often in their own end and in the neutral zone, sometimes when under pressure, sometimes when unforced. Their coverage faltered. Newly created line combinations that most interestingly — and questionably — featured Derek Stepan on the wing with center Erik Christensen and Marian Gaborik, failed to generate much of an attack.
As such, their three-game winning streak went out with a whimper just as the club’s two-game winning streak was snuffed in a 3-1 defeat here Nov. 4. Fact is, the Rangers have scored a total of three goals in going 0-3-1 in their last four trips here after a 13-2-1 run immediately following the lockout.
“They’re a better team [now],” Henrik Lundqvist said after a 35-save effort that propped up his team through most of the match. “They’re so deep.”
The Rangers were patient in Pittsburgh on Wednesday playing through a 1-0 deficit for more than 30 minutes before striking four times to win 4-1. But they wavered yesterday even though they were down only 1-0 after two on Nikolay Zherdev’s breakaway out of the penalty box off a homerun feed from Mike Richards at 9:06 of the second.
That one typified the afternoon, as the breakaway resulted off a play that broke down while the Rangers had control on the power play deep in the offensive zone. Brian Boyle, however, all but fanned on a pass to left point man Michal Rozsival, thus igniting the chain of events that led to the first of Zherdev’s two goals.
“That was on me,” said Boyle, who then bemoaned a lost opportunity at the other end later in the match. “If I give up a goal, I have to get it back, but I didn’t.
“As a team, we turned it over too much and that helped them get control of the neutral zone. We’re usually able to play smart and get it past [the opposition] into the zone and work down low, but not in this one.”
The Marc Staal-Dan Girardi pair, kept intact by coach John Tortorella even though the Flyers are so balanced they have no marquee unit, had a difficult time of it, with Girardi fighting the puck (and losing) throughout.
Michael Del Zotto, minus-three while paired with a below-par Rozsival, was stripped behind the net following a defensive zone faceoff victory for a turnover that led directly to the Ville Leino goal that gave the Flyers a 3-1 lead at 9:57 of the third, only 1:34 after Stepan converted Alex Frolov’s centering feed during a line change.
Tortorella flipped his lines in the third after his original top two units produced little. Stepan returned to the middle with Gaborik –no factor, with one shot in 17:00 — and Brandon Dubinsky on his flanks. Christensen wound up on the wing with Frolov and Artem Anisimov. Chris Drury was underused as the fourth-line center all afternoon with the underused Sean Avery and Dale Weise.
Perhaps the unfamiliarity of the combinations was complicit in the unfamiliarity of the Rangers’ game. Or maybe it was just a bad game against a better team.