The chants started just 5:53 into last night’s match at the Garden between the Rangers and Coyotes.
“Henrik! . . . Henrik! . . . Henrik!”
The problem with that was that Martin Biron was in nets for the Rangers, not Henrik Lundqvist, and the problem with the first six minutes was that Phoenix had scored two questionable goals to assume a 2-0 lead.
“I heard it,” Biron said. “You hear everything in this building, the good and the bad.”
Chris Drury heard it, too. And so the captain, playing his second game within 24 hours after an absence of almost nine weeks, skated by the goaltender and delivered a message.
“Dru slapped my pad and said, ‘Show ’em what you got,’ ” Biron said. “It feels pretty good to have the captain skate by you, showing confidence in you, knowing that you can do it.”
Biron did do it, allowing one goal the rest of the way before a perfect shootout performance in the 4-3 victory that came on Erik Christensen’s second skills competition winner of the year after rallies from 2-0 and 3-1.
“It’s not easy all of a sudden to be down 2-0 because you need points in this league and it’s my job to come in and win games,” Biron, 6-2, said following his first start in seven games and two weeks. “I was just concentrating on making the next save to give us the chance.
“It doesn’t matter what came before.”
But it did matter what came after for this spit-without-polish club that’s 20-13-1 and separating itself from the chaff at the bottom of the East with this 8-3 run that features this current three-game winning streak. It mattered that the Rangers stayed with the program and never wavered, though nothing came easy at all.
“We’re not that pretty of a team,” Brandon Prust said. “It’s hard work and grit and that’s what we do.”
It was Prust who scored his third shorthanded goal in the last 11 games-and his team’s league-leading eighth on the year-that brought the Blueshirts within 3-2 at 19:54 of the second. It was on a play where Coyotes netminder Jason LaBarbera wandered out of his net to try and play the puck before trying to scramble back in when he realized he couldn’t play it legally.
John Tortorella mixed his line combinations in the third (including sitting Derek Stepan for the first 8:34), the Rangers went on the attack, grinding, getting the puck in deep.
But it was still 3-2 Phoenix when Drury won a left wing draw back to Michal Rozsival, who fired through. Wingers Stepan and Sean Avery went to the front. Drury went to the front. Stepan banged home the rebound at 14:17.
And then after the Rangers had the only five shots of the overtime, the game went to a shootout. After scoring the lone shootout goal in the leadoff spot in a victory in Nashville on Nov. 27, Christensen did it again by beating LaBarbera up top.
“I had a plan coming in but had to change it because LaBarbera tried a poke-check,” Christensen said. “I had to improvise, which I normally don’t do so well.”
After two misses each, it came down to the final try by Phoenix’s Eric Belanger, Biron’s friend and junior teammate, who couldn’t keep control after faking a slapshot.
Maybe the chanting from the Garden crowd bothered him.
“Marty! . . . Marty! . . . Marty!”