The Rangers’ beleaguered penalty kill was monumental in yesterday’s 3-0 win in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference finals against the Devils.
By forcing the Devils to go 0-for-5 over a full 10:00 of man-advantage time, the Rangers took a 2-1 lead in the best-of-seven series with Game 4 tomorrow night at the Prudential Center.
“These games are so tight, that’s what it comes down to sometimes,” Rangers defenseman Marc Staal said about special teams. “Our penalty kill was huge tonight, and our power play found a way to get one.”
The biggest kill probably came 14:04 into the second period, when John Mitchell took an interference call. After killing it off with ease, the momentum slightly turned for what would be a great third period for the Rangers, when they scored all three of their goals, the first by Dan Girardi on the power play.
“We generated some opportunities, some zone time, moved the puck around well,” said Devils coach Pete DeBoer. “When their goalie [Henrik Lundqvist] is on like that, your goaltender is your best penalty killer, and I think that was the case.”
* Rangers captain Ryan Callahan scored an empty-net goal in the third period to finish off the scoring, his first “even-strength” goal since Game 1 of the first round against the Senators.
“Now I’ll just have to try to do it with a goalie in net,” Callahan said.
He has four goals in the postseason, with two coming on the power play.
On what turned out to be Girardi’s game-winning goal in the third period, the play started at the faceoff dot on a draw between Brad Richards and Danius Zubrus. Richards won the draw cleanly back to Girardi, who walked in and buried a wrist shot to make it 1-0.
“I made a mistake because I thought Richards would take it left,” Zubrus said. “It went right to the middle to Girardi. I was way out of position on that.”
Tortorella mixed his lines up again yesterday.
On what could be called the third line was center Brian Boyle with Brandon Prust and Mike Rupp on the wings, while the fourth line was Artem Anisimov–John Mitchell–Ruslan Fedotenko.
Both lines played essentially the same amount of even-strength minutes — not much — and could not spark an offense that continued to lack 5-on-5 production.
The top line of Carl Hagelin–Brad Richards–Marian Gaborik stayed intact. For a good portion of the first period, coming off a penalty kill, Hagelin was switched out for Chris Kreider, but at the start of the second, Kreider went back to skating with Callahan and Derek Stepan.
* Steve Eminger replaced Stu Bickel on the Rangers’ backline, and played a total of 6:20. It was Eminger’s second game of the playoffs, the first being in Game 1 against the Capitals in the second round, when he played 4:25 as a forward.
“We put [Eminger] in because we just wanted to get to pucks quicker,” coach John Tortorella said. “We thought he may be able to get to pucks quicker.
“We’ve had a few struggles with our coverage. “Bick’s a hell of a story as far as what he’s done for our hockey club this year. We tried it today. We’ll look at the tape, and I’m not sure where we go with it for the next game.”
The Devils kept Peter Harrold in on defense for the second straight game instead of rookie Adam Larsson.