The Rangers continued their pattern of playing down and failing to match their opponent’s intensity, falling 3-1 to the Kings on Tuesday. New York had a decent first period, but surrendered a very late goal. Periods 2 and 3 resulted in a relatively lackluster performance by the Blueshirts, who finally scored with less than a minute remaining. The defeat was the eighth straight contest where the team alternated wins and losses. Thursday will find New York in San Jose to face the Sharks.
Game recap:
David Quinn Post-Game:
A few thoughts:
1) Maybe it’s the
demons of 2014 but New York doesn’t seem to play well. Jonathan Quick, who came into the game with an .884 save percentage, gave up nothing until the final 29.7 seconds. New York didn’t really pressure him after the first but Quinn came up big when needed.
2)
Chris Kreider’s quote tells you all you need to know as to how well he thought New York played. As noted above, the effort seemed lacking. The Rangers has been physical coming in - and save for a few fights, yay - New York didn’t enforce their will on this game, allowing Los Angeles to control the action.
"They capitalized on their chances, and when they did they stayed in their structure and played a good defensive heavy game," Kreider said. "But you can't break a team down going east-west when they're playing like that. We needed to have a little more snarl, get to the net, get pucks to the net, and we weren't able to do that."
3)
Henrik Lundqvist didn’t play a bad game. The first goal against, scored by Dustin Brown - see my 2014 note above - after New York got caught in their own zone. Brendan Lemieux, Brett Howden, Pavel Buchnevich, Adam Fox and Marc Staal all were unable to get off the ice. They were gassed by the end of their shift, which was most of the last minute of the period, contributing to their inability to get clear the puck out of the defensive zone.
LA just kept shooting on net, until after a pair of saves and four blocked shots, Brown scored on a sharp-angle shot with 10.1 seconds remaining off Tyler Toffoli's pass from the left circle through the low slot to the right circle that got Lundqvist moving and unable to regain his footing. That tally ended Brown’s six-game goalless streak.
In keeping with the theme of Kings’ players who have scored in a while lighting the lamp, Toffoli got his first since November 2 in the second. Toffoli was able to get free of Ryan Lindgren at the edge of the crease to tap in the rebound off of Matt Roy’s shot. That’s all Lundqvist surrendered but it was more than enough for Los Angeles thanks to Quick and the Rangers’ lack of push.
4) As
Carp noted, “the Rangers officially lost their own second-round pick to Carolina on Tuesday when rookie defenseman Adam Fox played his 30th game. The April trade sent a second-rounder in 2019 and a conditional third-rounder in 2020 to the Hurricanes for the rights to sign Fox. The conditional third became a second if/when he played 30 games this season.”
The key question he noted was: “Does anybody think Fox wasn’t worth it?” Pretty confident the responding answer from everyone will be yes. Fox has been all that we could have hoped for and more. The Rangers thus “gain” back their third-rounder and have nine picks in the ’20 draft — including an extra third-rounder from Dallas because of the Mats Zuccarello trade — and three in the seventh round.
5) One more. Stop waiting for the perfect shot and put pucks on net. Even a weak shot could generate a rebound or bounce off bodies on front. But New York seems to wait way too often for the perfect shot, especially Kappo Kaako, impacting their ability to score.
New York Rangers Blogger • 
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