MONTREAL – When the season is over, when the final tallies are counted and the standings are established, no one will differentiate between good points and bad points.
Know this, however – the term, “loser’s point” was made for last night’s Rangers hockey team that conspired to blow a 5-0 second-period lead on their way to an astonishing 6-5 shootout defeat to the Canadiens.
This was spectacular in the way of a five-alarm blaze. This was incredible entertainment.
Words won’t matter for the Rangers, not in the wake of a night on which Saku Koivu’s shootout score brought the Canadiens all the way back from a 5-0 hole into which they leaped with such gusto just 5:03 into the second. Brave stances of defiance won’t matter for the Blueshirts, who dominated every facet of the game in building their lead and then simply collapsed after carrying a 5-2 lead into third.
And while the point ultimately is likely to matter, the Rangers now must confront the ghost of this colossal failure in which they played nearly the entire third period in the shadow of their own goal posts, and in which Henrik Lundqvist suffered the same meltdown as did his teammates.
This will be about the Rangers somehow tricking themselves that coming up here and taking a point can be regarded as a good thing. This will be about coach Tom Renney and the veteran voices in the room somehow providing a calming influence over the final 20 games of the season.
This will be about the Rangers avoiding panic the next time. This will be about separating the good from the bad. This will be about Jaromir Jagr building off a superior four-assist performance in the first 40 minutes rather than shouldering the load for a 12th consecutive scoreless game that ended with a miss on the final shootout attempt.
If they can and he can, that is.
This wasn’t just two different games, the first 28:27 over which the Blueshirts had a 5-0 lead, the last 31:32 of regulation over which the Blueshirts were overwhelmed. This was two different universes. Up became down.
The Jagr-Mike Komisarek storyline was stillborn once Brandon Dubinsky and Sean Avery struck 14 seconds apart with the defenseman on the ice to give the Rangers a 2-0 lead at 9:04 of the first. When Brendan Shanahan scored a PPG at 13:56, Carey Price was driven from nets. And then when Shanahan and Chris Drury scored 28 seconds apart on both ends of a double minor assessed to raging bull Komisarek early in the second, the game was as good as done.
As if.
Before the game, Renney had suggested discomfort with using Jason Strudwick in place of Colton Orr (flu) on the right side of the fourth line with Blair Betts and Ryan Hollweg. Yet that was the unit against which the Canadiens scored twice midway through the second, not that it was on Strudwick.
And then in third, it couldn’t have mattered less who was on the ice for the Blueshirts, for not a single line or defense pairing was able to cope with Montreal, which got two goals from Michael Ryder, one from Mark Streit and a pair of goals from the brilliant Alex Kovalev to send the thing into OT, and ultimately a shootout.
Which the Rangers lost – as they lost the game.
Don’t let the point fool you.