PHILADELPHIA — The task in front of the Rangers is now to do something they were unable to accomplish during the regular season — win one out of two games at the Wells Fargo Center.
After dropping both road contests to the Flyers this season, the Blueshirts boarded a train on Monday afternoon and headed for the City of Brotherly Love, preparing for Game 3 of this first-round series on Tuesday night with the battle knotted at one game apiece.
“I don’t think anyone was expecting to win four straight,” forward Mats Zuccarello said after an optional practice at the Garden on Monday. “It’s a tough team to play against. We just have to go to their building and try and get one.”
Zuccarello and the Rangers seemed primed to take control of this series on Sunday afternoon, when they followed up their 4-1 win in Game 1 by getting out to a 2-0 lead in Game 2. Yet they watched as the Flyers scored three unanswered goals and added an empty-netter en route to a 4-2 victory that eliminated the home-ice advantage the Rangers had worked for all season.
Eliminated it, of course, only if the Flyers can hold court in their own building and find themselves coming back to Manhattan for next Sunday’s Game 5 with a commanding 3-1 series lead.
“Nothing has changed,” Zuccarello said about dealing with the Game 2 disappointment. “We still think we can move on from this, but we have to take one game at a time. Obviously we have to step it up a little bit.”
If the Flyers are carrying some momentum from those two regular-season wins over the Rangers in Philadelphia, then it’s really more a motivation tool rather than a historical remembrance.
The first game, on Oct. 26, resulted in a 2-1 Flyers win — but was so early in the season that it was a game between teams admittedly playing bad hockey. The second game, on March 1, was a little bit more interesting, as the Flyers went up 2-0, the Rangers tied it 2-2, and then Wayne Simmonds scored a power-play goal late in the second, with Luke Schenn adding another in the third for a 4-2 Philly win.
“They were all hard-fought games,” said coach Alain Vigneault, who really struggled to come up with the difference between the home and away games. “If you break it down, there’s not a lot separating both teams. I’m really not that focused on what happened before. I’m trying to focus on the next game.”
One thing that will certainly be true is that the crowd will be wholeheartedly behind their new incarnation of the Broad Street Bullies, and that’s something the Rangers are fully aware of.
“You have to be disciplined there,” said defenseman Ryan McDonagh, who without the last change might not find himself on the ice quite as often with Flyers’ captain Claude Giroux, against whom a little personal hatred has begun to fester. “The crowd will be feeding off their physical play — don’t buy into it, don’t get caught up into it. We’ve done a good job so far as being disciplined and that has to continue, for sure.”
Yet that surely doesn’t mean the Rangers can afford to play with any less intensity than they did in the Garden. Instead, when Zuccarello was asked if they should ratchet up their battle level now that they’re on the road, he reconfirmed their ever-present desire for consistent effort.
“I think we should have that every game, it doesn’t matter if we play here or there,” Zuccarello said. “It’s 1-1 in games, and we have to win one there. Easy as that.”