HENRIK Lundqvist swears he loves goaltending for a team that probably will lose on the next goal he gives up.
“It’s fun, keeps you sharp,” he said. “Playing in goal is so much mental, keeps you on the edge all the time.”
One of Lundqvist’s favorite off-ice activities is tap dancing in mine fields. For post-career work, he wants to be Sean Avery’s bodyguard, so this Month of Living Dangerously is right up his alley, the narrow alleys where last night the Rangers channeled the revamped Flyers right into King Henrik’s blind end.
The goal-less wonders squeaked out another one, 2-0, making it four consecutive wins while scoring a total of eight times. Tom Renney’s boys are playing it tighter than a Jim Dolan smile in accepting a Freedom of Information Foundation award, and that’s a good thing, of course. The best defensive teams usually are the ones still playing in late May.
Nevertheless, we remain almost as stupefied as The Garden sat for long, silent periods before Brendan Shanahan’s goal with 3:21 remaining put it away. There wasn’t a whole lot going on out there for long stretches in a game between two time-tested rivals and, probably, top six finishers this season in the Eastern Conference.
And of course the Rangers, 5-1 in their last six to climb over .500 for the season, can’t keep this pace without all these scorers at some point starting to earn their big bucks.
But interestingly, these players are squeezing the sticks hard only in the offensive end, strangely suffering no anxiety elsewhere. The Rangers are winning not because Lundqvist is standing on his head but because he is allowing his teammates to keep theirs.
Calm, cool and collected, they remain in the knowledge that their goalie will collect what few mistakes they make.
R.J. Umberger burst past Fedor Tyutin in the first 90 seconds of the game to create a two-on-one, and Lundqvist stopped it. Michal Rozsival lost Scottie Upshall for a short-handed breakaway in the second period and the speedy Flyer forward had his angle surgically cut off by Lundqvist’s pads.
Joffrey Lupul had a chance created when Danny Briere came out of the penalty bench and the goalie buried that one, as he did a Lupul doorstep rebound with five minutes remaining.
“Sometimes when a goalie isn’t getting a lot of shots, it’s tough to concentrate,” said Shanahan. “But his concentration has been excellent.”
Maybe that’s because Lundqvist, who since Christmas has given up two or fewer goals in 41 of 56 starts, is fundamentally excellent. No one is good enough to continue to hold opponents to one goal or less in seven of eight games, including four shutouts. But we know by now that this guy is as real as those recent numbers are unreal. He is the absolute bottom line to how the Rangers have escaped seven seasons in the wilderness.
They could work through a bad October because their goalie was giving them, is still giving them, a chance to win regardless.
“It’s tough when we’re not scoring much, but we’re playing, really, really, well, especially in third periods,” Lundqvist said. “[A goalie] wants to be in the game [fielding] shots, but as long as there’s a zero on the scoreboard, you’re pretty comfortable.
“It doesn’t matter how you do it as long as you win, and I think the crowd felt the same way. It wasn’t great to watch, but we played smart and got the two points. ”
Indeed, the fans never get restless, either. This goalie calms the most impatient of them, too.