Suppressing a third-period comeback is a matter of good luck, but the Rangers can’t hope to have the same luck twice.
However, this is exactly what the Blueshirts got, when the Devils gave them a powerful play that Mika Zibanejad took advantage of to break the tie and get a 5-3 victory on Sunday afternoon at the Prudential Center. The win completed the four-game sweep of the Devils, which the Rangers desperately needed to be able to hang on to the playoff race.
The Rangers took a 3-1 lead in the third period, but for the second day in a row, the Devils buried two quick goals with plenty of play to finish. On Saturday, the Devils only reached one and never managed to tie it. This time, two were all they needed to equalize the score.
But Devils defender Ryan Murray was caught by Kaapo Kakko, who gave the Rangers a timely advantage for the man. Zibanejad took the magic of Pavel Buchnevich’s birthday on Saturday and defeated the winner of the match with three minutes left by regulation.
Ryan Strome hit the road to an empty net goal and was given the 5-3 lead.
“Playing a team four times in a row, when you come away with four wins, I don’t care what it looks like,” head coach David Quinn said of the win, which kept the Rangers four points from fourth place in the playoffs and the Bruins, who have two games on hand. “I don’t care how many leads you blew. I do not care. It doesn’t matter, if you can’t find ways to win and that’s what we did.
“Now, having said that, we certainly understand that if we are to succeed, we will have to play better. We know that this is not lost in us, it is not lost in the coaches and I think it is not lost in any of the players ”.
The Rangers had a fright at the end of the first period, when goalkeeper Alexandar Georgiev had to be helped out of the ice and went down the tunnel favoring his left leg. Igor Shesterkin had to make two stops in 2:19 of ice time to end the period before Georgiev started the second again.
Georgiev, who said after the match that he had his knee closed, was able to finish the match and finished with 25 stops.
The Rangers spent most of the first 20 minutes in the defensive zone, as the Devils held possession continuously. But every time the Devils made a mistake, the Rangers rushed in, as did the entire series.
With Devils captain Nico Hischier in the box to attack Jacob Trouba, who was starting to hit the first few shots and provoked the anger of his opponents, Zibanejad hit Chris Kreider at the door to facilitate the touchdown. Kreider’s score at 6:31 gave him 10 power goals in the season.
It was the debutants who propelled the Rangers to a 3-0 lead. At the end of the first, Vitali Kravtsov finished with the first goal in the NHL before the first qualifier of Alexis Lafreniere, at the beginning of the second, got a comfortable margin.
After acknowledging that abandoning the third-party advantages the team will have to talk about, Zibanejad made it clear that the Rangers ’gaze is on the playoffs.
“We’ve put ourselves in a good place,” he said. “So we try to play one game at a time, and it sounds very cliché, but that’s all we can do. We just have to worry about the next game and try to get the two points and move on.”