GLORY DAZE
EDMONTON, Alberta — The Rangers’ vaunted structure was nothing more than a house of cards on Friday in a 75 defeat on Glen Sather Night, which seemed a throwback to the bad old days early in the millennium when Slats was behind the bench on Broadway.
The Blueshirts are crashing, their seasonlong deficiencies in the defensive zone, most specifically in coverage in front of their own net, the primary factor in their fourth (131) in the past five games and seventh defeat (261) in the past nine matches with the final game of this threegame trip up Saturday in Calgary.
“This has to be rectified right now,” Dan Girardi said after a nightmarish performance. “I really don’t have any explanation for this.
“We kept making mistakes, we kept coming back and then we made more mistakes. It got away from us.”
Truly, it was shocking how the Blueshirts collapsed three different times in the game, falling behind 31 in a chaotic first period, then 53 in the early minutes of the third after having tied it midway through the second, and then again immediately after having tied the game 55 with 1:46 to go in regulation, only to yield the winner 13 seconds thereafter.
“It’s those critical moments in this game and the last game,” said Henrik Lundqvist, pulled 2:44 into the third after allowing two goals on three shots in the period and five on 33 overall. “That’s when the games are decided and right now we don’t have it.”
Ryan McDonagh was on for five goals against, including the final one on which Taylor Hall beat Antti Raanta on a twoonone with Dan Boyle back. Girardi was on for five goals against. Rick Nash, who scored the 55 goal on a power play with Raanta pulled for the extra attacker, was also on for five goals against.
“We’re like any team in the NHL. We need our top players to be good at both ends of the rink,” a stunned Alain Vigneault said after coaching his 1,000th game. “We scored five goals on the road and you’d think that would be enough to win, but that wasn’t the case.”
Honestly, it is difficult to figure just where the Blueshirts turn. The defense is unreliable with the McDonaghGirardi alleged first pair an adventure in itself. Breakdowns in discipline are replete, both technically and emotionally, as exemplified by Chris Kreider’s senseless roughing penalty late in the second on which Edmonton took advantage for a 43 lead at 0:18, just seconds after he escaped the box.
And though Lundqvist was often a victim of negligence, The King was shaky most of the way, seemingly late in tracking the puck and unable to grasp it just as his team was unable to get a grasp on the game.
“I overchallenged,” Lundqvist said. “We’re beating ourselves a little bit, and that’s the difference between finding ways to win and finding ways to lose.”
The Rangers had come into the match having scored seven goals in their previous four games and 16 in the previous eight. So they got five in 60 minutes, including a pair from Derick Brassard, one from Nash, one from Mats Zuccarello and one from Kreider, but some how managed to conspire to lose, anyway, the defeat sealed on Lauri Korpikoski’s hat trick emptynetter.
“This isn’t the first time we’ve allowed a goal right after we scored,” said Brassard, who was probably the Rangers’ best forward though he was on for three against, including the emptynetter. “We have to make sure we’re ready to play when we go to the dot.”
Vigneault, whose team allowed as many as seven goals in a regularseason game for the first time since a 92 defeat in San Jose on Oct. 8, 2013, in his third game behind the Blueshirts’ bench, had no explanation for the slovenly performance.
“We made too many individual mistakes,” Vigneault said. “On the winner, we made a couple of mistakes to give them the twoonone, we didn’t play the twoonone right, and it was in the back of our net.”
In the back of the net seven times on a night the team sure had a funny way of paying homage to Glen Sather.