Kids may be fine, but the Rangers need their veterans to win.
Coming out of a game in which their young core led the team to at least one point in a defeat against the Penguins, the Rangers finally saw the life of their veteran group, but not much enough, as they fell 3 -2 against the same team. Sunday night in Pittsburgh.
“Our veterans know they have to be better, there’s no doubt about it,” head coach David Quinn said after the loss, which brought the Rangers down to 1-3-1. “We talked to them in private, they admitted it, they know it. The good news is that they are guys who are established players in this league and who are good players. The good news is that our young players continue to develop and play good hockey against really good players.
But the Rangers lost one of their most crucial youngsters just over halfway through the second period, when 21-year-old Filip Chytil collided with Evan Rodrigues. He hit the ice hard and it took him a while to get up before heading to the locker rooms with what the team said was an upper body injury. Quinn has no Chytil updates after the match.
The Penguins, once again, came from behind as they cleared a 2-1 deficit to start the third period with goals from Jared McCann and Jake Guentzel. Despite the opportunity to play with the match tied 2-2 in the final table, the Rangers were unable to capitalize and ultimately abandoned the winner of Guentzel’s match when they were approximately 1:30 clockwise.
“We can sit here and talk about some of the good things we did and the chances we had in the third period,” Quinn said. “But you have to win hockey games, you have to find a way to win. A boy cannot get a shot from this area with a minute and 30 left to finish. You have to have an urgency, you have to know who is dangerous and really disappointing.
“Going in here and playing good hockey and coming out with a point is really disappointing.”
For the second game in a row, the 20-year-olds were the only players to keep the Rangers competitive. Rookie defender K’Andre Miller broke the play, set up his teammates in the race and starred Sidney Crosby, a Penguins star with a body in the corners, to keep the Rangers in the game.
Second-year defender Adam Fox extended his points streak to four games when his shot from the top of the area was redirected to 16:36 of the first period by Harvard student Colin Blackwell, who was promoted from the taxi roster earlier in the day to make his Rangers debut.
Blackwell, Brett Howden and Kevin Rooney’s fourth new lineup generated some of the Rangers’ most dangerous chances.
Although Ryan Strome recorded his first point of the season when he threw a bouncing puck in the Penguins coach’s Tristan Jarry retreat to break a 1-on-1 tie at 5:17 p.m. of the top six finishers. take away a victory.
“We know our roles, we know our responsibilities, but we couldn’t get there,” said Mika Zibanejad, who had two shots on goal. “You can’t just lie down and feel sorry for yourself, you just have to work on it and get started.”
The only Rangers youngster not to be in charge of his game was rookie goalkeeper Igor Shesterkin, who deflected 16 of the 19 shots he faced in his first consecutive start to the season.
However, the Rangers had one of their best early periods of the season, getting a 1-0 lead on Blackwell’s score at 16:36. But Bryan Rust managed to tie in a breakaway more than halfway through the second period with his second goal in so many other games against the Rangers.
“Viously, obviously you get up with nothing, you feel good, but I just thought we were really careless for about 12 minutes in that second period,” Quinn said. “You could guess, I knew they would get it.”