PITTSBURGH — It was a gem, and now it’s buried.
Henrik Lundqvist did just about all he could on Sunday night at CONSOL Energy Center to will the Rangers to a win, but his teammates failed him. The result was a 3-0 loss to the Penguins in Game 2 of this second-round playoff series, the best-of-seven contest now tied at one game apiece as the scene shifts to New York for Game 3 on Monday night.
“Did my goaltender look tired?” asked coach Alain Vigneault after the game, his team now having played four games in six nights. “He was on top of his game, he wasn’t tired. I don’t think anybody else should be tired. He’s played every minute of the playoffs [Lundqvist was pulled in the third period of Game 6 of the first-round], so if he’s not tired, nobody else should be.”
The question of fatigue was raised because the Rangers have been strapped with a rather tough schedule, one that gets tougher as the second leg of a back-to-back is still to come. But just as Vigneault said, Lundqvist looked as sharp as he has all season, making 15 of his 32 saves in the second period when the Penguins skill was on full display, keeping the Rangers’ deficit at just a 1-0 when it could have been far more lopsided.
“They just spent a lot of time in our own end, that was the biggest difference,” Lundqvist said. “You have to expect them to come hard.”
The Rangers had it all laid out in front of them in the first 10 minutes of this one, the chance to take over the game and the series just sitting there. The Penguins took three bad penalties in the opening 7:04, and the Rangers fumbling power play got just two shots on net, making the unit without a goal in its past 29 attempts.
“You could see them, they got going, they got the crowd behind them,” Lundqvist said. “There are a lot of areas we can work on. It’s a tight game, so every little thing matters, every little play. Every chance you get to put the puck in the net, you have to try to grab it.”
There were few chances for the Rangers to even try and take advantage of, as they got just 22 shots on Marc-Andre Fleury, who collected all of them en route to his seventh postseason shutout, most in Penguins’ history.
Yet the doughnut hanging on the scoreboard was more a result of the Rangers’ ineptitude than Fleury’s brilliance. The Blueshirts were sloppy with the puck, they lost battles all over the ice, and couldn’t maintain any sort of pressure in the offensive zone — that is, when they could actually get the puck over the Penguins’ blue line.
“They just played a little harder than we did tonight in certain areas,” said alternate captain Brad Richards. “We didn’t sustain enough. They were desperate, they knew they had to win this game and we didn’t match it.”
What was seemingly unmatchable was the performance of Lundqvist, arguably the best he has been all season. He made a handful of jaw-dropping stops in the second period, one a stretched-out, right-pad save on Sidney Crosby, and also a cold stoning on a Chris Kunitz breakaway.
The Penguins did manage to get one in the second, as a Kris Letang centering pass deflected in off Dan Girardi’s sprawled out stick. And then in the third, Jussi Jokinen added a power-play tally, and Evgeni Malkin finished it off into the empty net in the waning seconds.
And now it’s as quick a turnaround as possible, and the Penguins are hoping to take advantage.
“We want to make the schedule a factor,” said Pittsburgh coach Dan Byslma. “We want to make this as hard as we can.”
Added Lundqvist, “It’s been a lot of hockey, but you have to tell yourself it’s a great opportunity to come home and play the first home game of Round Two. We’ll be ready to go.”