The New York Rangers defeated the Winnipeg Jets 2-1 at the MTS Centre. For a box score, click here.
The Rangers went into tonight slightly shorthanded. Zibanejad and Buchnevich have been out long term. We knew Nash and Puempel wouldn’t be on the trip. Then came news that Vesey couldn’t go either. So the Rangers basically had two forward lines. Fortunately those lines came to play. We’ve seen recently how well the Kreider-Stepan-Zuccarello line has looked and they continued that tonight. But the Grabner-Hayes-Miller line was reunited and looked like they hadn’t missed a beat. Every time either of those lines were on the ice, they were making things happen.
Like Tuesday night, the visitors dominated the first period. The difference tonight was they went to the first intermission up 1-0 after a beautiful pass by Stepan allowed Kreider an easy power play goal into an open net. It should have been much more than that and I’m sure many (myself included) started to worry that those missed opportunities would burn them.
It seemed like that fear was real when the Jets came out flying in the second period. It reminded me of a couple of years ago when we all tried to forget about the middle twenty minutes each night. I really thought we were past those days but apparently they are back. I, for one, didn’t miss them. The Jets tied the game midway through the period leaving us with the cliche “win a period, win a game”.
The Rangers continued their pattern of not taking an actual penalty through forty minutes (I don’t count delay of game) and then taking two in a short span in the third. They managed to kill them this time and then with three minutes to go, Dan Girardi drew a game changing penalty. It took almost the entire two minutes but a flubbed shot by McDonagh landed on Hayes stick in front of the net and he put it in to give the Rangers the lead with 1:09 to go.
To say that remaining 1:09 was frantic would probably be an understatement. But the Rangers, with Girardi and Staal looking like vintage versions of themselves, got the job done. The puck stayed in the defensive zone but not only did the Jets not score, they didn’t get a single shot either. Have to give credit to Lindberg, Fast and Grabner there too.
And so the Rangers pulled out a needed win. On MSG, they kept calling it a “must win”. I’m not sure I can call a December game against the Winnipeg Jets a must win but they definitely needed to get back in the right column. We’ll see if they can end this win-loss trend tomorrow night when they head to Chicago for a match up with the just as injured Blackhawks.
(Photo by Darcy Finley/NHLI via Getty Images)
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