There were large-scale lineup changes for the Rangers on Monday night, and if it did some good, it surely didn’t produce the one result that matters.
Though they subbed out two forwards and a defenseman, the Rangers still lost Game 3 of their second-round playoff series, 2-0, to the Penguins at the Garden.
Up front, it was Derek Dorsett and Dan Carcillo both coming out, replaced by Jesper Fast and J.T. Miller. On defense, John Moore came out for Raphael Diaz, playing his first game this postseason.
It was a clear move for skill over brawn, but coach Alain Vigneault was not willing to get into the specifics.
“I’m not going to get into all the reasoning why,” he said after the game, his team now down in the best-of-seven series, 2-1. “Probably easy to say that the schedule and fresh legs.”
The schedule, yes, the one that Vigneault called “stupid” after his team played five games in seven nights, the first team to do so in the postseason since 1989.
Miller got 11:34 of ice time while mostly on a line with Derek Stepan and Martin St. Louis, while Fast played just 8:38 while on the fourth line with Brian Boyle and Dominic Moore.
The one move that could have been seen coming was Dorsett coming out, as he took a bad boarding call late in Game 2, a penalty that occurred with the Rangers down just 1-0 and less than five minutes remaining.
“At the end of the day, Dorse put himself in that position,” Vigneault said on Monday afternoon, referring to Dorsett’s penalty, not his exiting the lineup. “I’m not sure how strong of a call it was, but they made the call. We have been very disciplined, [but] we’re not perfect. We’re going to try and be real disciplined.”
Miller created some offensive chances in his time on the ice, and Fast contributed by taking a stick to the face from James Neal late in the first period, his mouth spilling blood and drawing a four-minute double-minor. Both Miller and Fast had played two games each in the first-round, seven-game win over the Flyers, the Rangers still reeling from Chris Kreider’s left-hand injury.
Diaz played a solid game, putting a team-high six shots on net in nine attempts, and getting 6:18 of his 19:30 on the power play. For stretches of the third period, he paired with Marc Staal, and Diaz played more than Staal’s regular partner, Anton Stralman, who got 15:15 and not a second on the power play. *
Game 3 was Henrik Lundqvist’s 77th postseason appearance in the Rangers net, passing Mike Richter atop the franchise list. It was his 76th consecutive start.
Lundqvist has had a season of milestones, passing Richter’s franchise win total when collected No. 302 on March 18, and passing Eddie Giacomin with shutout No. 50 on March 23.