With no context, last night’s game at the Garden was so sloppy it could have been confused as a preseason match between the Rangers and Penguins.
When looking at the face of goalie Henrik Lundqvist, standing at the bench after being pulled halfway through, it was brutally clear that wasn’t true.
Two games into this lockout-shortened season, the Rangers have shown themselves not to be the same disciplined team that made it to the Eastern Conference Finals just eight months ago, and looked miles away from that group when the Penguins and their backup goalie, Tomas Vokoun, thoroughly beat them, 6-3.
“The team needs to play better and I need to play better,” said Lundqvist, who was pulled from a game for the first time since Oct. 22, 2011 in Edmonton, the sixth game of last season, when he had a skate issue.
“It was one of those nights when things weren’t going our way,” the reigning Vezina Trophy winner said. “Even though it’s early, we have to correct it fast.”
This was the first game of the season at the revamped Garden, and it was supposed to be a grand return for the Blueshirts and their Blue Seat Faithful. Instead, the fans who suffered through the four-month lockout got a team that took six minor penalties, gave up wide swaths of open ice, were consistently outskated and were physically pushed around for the second night in a row.
On Saturday, it was a 3-1 loss at the hands of the Bruins. Last night, in the first of the season’s six back-to-back game nights, Lundqvist was allowed just 29:11 in nets, making 14 saves on 18 shots, before coach John Tortorella mercifully pulled him. None of the four goals he gave up clearly was his fault.
“I was not going to keep him in there,” Tortorella said about Lundqvist, who was replaced by Martin Biron. “It wasn’t him. I wasn’t going to keep him in there with what was going on in front of him.”
The Black-and-Blueshirt mentality that has served the Rangers so well was not the idea behind alternate captain Brad Richards taking an interference penalty 37 seconds into the game. That led to James Neal ripping a power-play wrist shot over Lundqvist’s glove to make it 1-0 before all the fans could even settle in.
Ryan Callahan did his best eight minutes later to reenergize the building by slapping in a bouncing rebound on a 5-on-3 advantage, tying it 1-1. But by the end of the first period, behind a open stuff-in by Tyler Kennedy and a deflected point shot from Matt Niskanen, the Rangers were trailing 3-1 and the boos rained down.
“It was 1-1 in the first, and we just let it get away from us again,” Richards said. “The details of the game have to be cleaned up.”
Neal added his second goal of the night in the third period, when he was shockingly wide-open on the doorstep and slid one past Biron, who had stopped 19 of 20 shots. Under a minute later, Taylor Pyatt deflected one in for his first goal as a Ranger. The team’s lone bright spot, Rick Nash, added a shorthanded goal with just over five minutes left.
By then it was too little, too late, and Kris Letang finished it off for the Penguins with an empty-netter.
The last-place Rangers have many questions to answer, including ones about the details they most took pride in — heart and determination.
“That’s a big detail,” Richards said. “How we play and how this team has played the last couple years is not there yet.”