If his teammates had brought the same passion to the rink that Paul Mara did last night, perhaps the Rangers would have been able to extend their season-opening winning streak to six games.
Alas, the Blueshirts could not muster either the resolve or commitment to battle their way through a night on which things weren’t necessarily going their way. They were the second-hardest working team on the Garden ice, and thus the lowest-scoring team on the ice.
Buffalo 3, Rangers 1, not that close.
“This shows, first of all, that we have to be a team that competes,” said Markus Naslund, who was removed from Scott Gomez’s malfunctioning line in a third period in which coach Tom Renney juggled every forward unit.
“Even though we won the first five games, we weren’t fooling ourselves that we were at our best.
“It’s not like the coaching staff was overly happy with our play. We have a lot of work to do. It was a reality check.”
If the defeat in which the Rangers went 19:45 without a shot after taking a 1-0 lead at 6:32 of the first was a reality check, that’s hardly the description for the check Patrick Kaleta attempted to throw on Mara midway through the second with the score 1-1.
Kaleta left his feet in a running attempt to nail Mara against the right wall, just as he had done in Buffalo on Feb. 23 last season. Then, Mara sustained facial fractures that kept him out of the Rangers’ lineup for over a month.
Last night, after avoiding the hit, Mara dropped his gloves and pounded Kaleta, who refused to fight back. Kaleta gained a five-minute major power play for his team by turtling, one on which the Sabres got the winning goal.
Mara, however, gained an immense amount of respect by taking a stand that his teammates would have been well advised to duplicate.
“I’m sorry I put the team down five minutes, but I did what I had to do and I’m not sorry I stood up for myself against a guy who leaves his feet like that,” Mara said. “You can’t have that in this game . . . it’s classless.
“I thought he’d fight back. I never expected to put us down five minutes. You figure if a guy is going to run around like that and leave his feet, he’d be man enough to stand up for himself but, unfortunately, he didn’t.
“And then in the scrum after the fight, he was saying, ‘How’s your broken face?’ You don’t say that to a guy who was injured. It’s chicken-[bleep].”
The Rangers may have yielded the winner attempting to kill the major – Thomas Vanek, dominant all night, getting his first of two from in front – but they had yielded their authority early by playing far too individualistically on both sides of the puck.
Renney, meanwhile, offered nothing but support for Mara, who has played with an effective snarl since returning to the Rangers as a free agent after spurning a considerably larger offer from Ottawa.
“At the end of the day, I don’t have a problem with it,” said the coach. “Paul made the decision he had to. He had the requisite passion that was missing [from the team].
“At least he cared enough to put himself in harm’s way.”
Sabres 3
Rangers 1