John Tortorella issued a guarantee, all right, but it sure wasn’t enough for the Rangers coach to get the Back Page.
“I guarantee that we’ll be ready to play Saturday,” said Tortorella, whose team will face Game 5 playoff extinction tomorrow afternoon in Washington. “We’ll learn our lessons, we’ll bounce back; I don’t expect anything less.
“I know the team. I know who they are.”
For the time being, they are the team that coughed up a 3-0 lead after two periods to lose a 4-3, double overtime Game 4 at the Garden on Wednesday.
They surrendered two quick goals, were overwhelmed much of the way after that, and finally fell when Jason Chimera took advantage of a bizarre mishap between Henrik Lundqvist and Marian Gaborik in which the winger knocked the puck away from the goaltender just as he was about to cover it in front of the crease.
“I tried to clear and I didn’t know Hank was going for it,” Gaborik said yesterday. “It was just bad luck.
“I should have seen Hank go for it, I guess. I didn’t hear him. If I had seen him, I would have let it go.”
Gaborik, who scored his first goal of the series on a slam dunk off a sweet setup from Ruslan Fedotenko but had trouble on the rush and on the power play that was nothing more than an energy drain in going 0-for-7 in 13:02, vowed that he and his teammates would put Wednesday behind them.
“It’s hard to swallow, but we have to put it behind us,” said Gaborik, whose goal to make it 2-0 at 13:40 of the second was his first since March 20.
“We have to move by it, we can’t beat ourselves up; we have to bring confidence and positive energy into the next game.
“That’s what we do. We’re professionals.”
No team in NHL history has blown a 3-1 series lead in consecutive years. The Caps, of course, were beaten in seven a year ago by Montreal despite going home with a 3-1 edge in that 1-8 opening-round matchup.
Tortorella said he would not reference the Caps’ historical difficulty closing to motivate or encourage his team. Chris Drury offered motivation enough, though, when he said: “The margin for error . . . there is none.”