Rangers Overcome Bad Start for 5th Win

The New York Rangers defeated the Boston Bruins by a score of 5-2 at MSG. For a box score, click here.

Sometimes a game screams “trap” game. Tonight was one of those games as the Bruins were coming off a 5-0 loss at home last night and had a rookie goaltender making his first NHL start. So what did the Rangers do? Let up a goal 10 seconds into the game, of course.

I’m honestly not even going to talk about the first period. I don’t know why the Rangers weren’t ready to start this game but they clearly weren’t. The good news is the Bruins didn’t look much better. Unfortunately they managed a 2-0 lead after 20 minutes due to the early giveaway by Holden (who had his minutes cut back significantly tonight) and a complete softie by Lundqvist with a little over five minutes to go in the period.

The second period didn’t start much better and it looked like Zane McIntyre was going to easily coast to his first NHL win.

Then eight minutes into the period, Boston took their 4th penalty of the night. The power play up until that point looked horrible and even this power play didn’t look great. But the puck ended up in the crease where Rick Nash was able to lift it over McIntyre to get the Rangers on the board.

Of course that didn’t wake the team up either. Less than two minutes later David Pastrnak got Girardi with a questionable hit up high. Girardi went down but of course tried to get up right away. Jim Ramsay brought him straight to the locker room while Pastrnak got two minutes for an “illegal hit to the head”. Of every rule this crazy league has, I will never understand why that penalty is only two minutes.

The Rangers didn’t score on that power play but you could tell something clicked and a couple minutes later, we finally had a tie game as this puck somehow found the back of the net:

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I know McIntyre is a rookie but I still don’t understand how that puck gets behind him. Mix that goal with Girardi returning to the bench shortly afterwards and the Rangers finally decided to show up for the game. Girardi would draw a penalty on his first shift back and Pirri would make the Bruins pay for continuing to go after their alternate captain.

Rather than sit back and wait, the Rangers got two quick goals from Pirri and Vesey just three minutes into the third period to make it a 5-2 game. I wouldn’t say the team was trying to score after that but they weren’t sitting back either. In the end, the five unanswered goals were enough to deflate an already shaky Bruins team and the Rangers were able to skate off with another stick salute to their fans.

Was it the prettiest win? Nope, wasn’t close to a pretty win. But they always say you don’t get style points so two points are two points. The bigger issues are regarding injuries. Girardi returned to the game and afterwards said he was fine but we won’t know for sure until he wakes up tomorrow and still feels the same way. He looked okay on the ice to me but again, it’s Girardi. He plays through everything and until last season, no one could ever tell.

The other issue is up front where Josh Jooris suffered a separated shoulder at some point in the first period. The good news is Buchnevich (and hopefully Kreider) should be back soon. The Rangers, specifically Zibanejad, desperately miss both so this just solves a problem Vigneault would’ve had if he had 24 healthy players. Hopefully one or both will be ready when the Rangers head to Carolina for a Friday night matchup with the Hurricanes.