After wasting three-goal lead, Rangers force overtime but fall to Wild in shootout

ST. PAUL, Minn. — When the Rangers scored the first three goals of the game in the opening 6:53 on Saturday night, it looked as if it were going to be a cakewalk kind of night against the Wild at the Xcel Energy Center.

It wasn’t.

The Rangers stopped playing. Or stopped playing well. And they eventually fell behind early in the third period before Chris Kreider tied it again, and the game went to overtime.

Neither team scored in overtime and the Wild won, 5-4, in the third round of the shootout. Matt Boldy beat Jonathan Quick (the puck hit the crossbar and trickled behind the goalie) and Vincent Trocheck was stopped by the left pad of Marc Andre-Fleury.

“We’ll certainly take the point,” Jimmy Vesey said. “Every point’s big in this league. But we’ve got to play better than we did tonight.”

The Rangers, who had won six in a row, got that point playing without the injured Adam Fox, Filip Chytil and Igor Shesterkin, and without Barclay Goodrow, whose wife was about to give birth to their son.

The Rangers were outshot 40-19. Quick, starting in place of Shesterkin, stopped 36 shots and was the only reason the Rangers didn’t lose in regulation.

“It was a good start,” coach Peter Laviolette said. “Tough middle. Interesting game. Disappointing to not come away with the win when you go up 3-0. I think that’s the frustrating part. We were in a good spot and we lost sync completely.”

The Rangers took a 1-0 lead 3:36 into the game when Ryan Lindgren’s shot glanced off Tyler Pitlick and Vesey and past Filip Gustavsson. It was Vesey’s first goal of the season and the first points for Minnesota natives Lindgren and Pitlick.

Artemi Panarin made it 2-0 with a goal at 5:52, his sixth of the season. Panarin has a point in 11 straight games.

Just 1:01 later, Erik Gustafsson scored his third goal of the season as the trailer on a three-on-two with a blast that drove Gustavsson from the game. The Minnesota goalie, who stopped one of four shots, was replaced by Fleury.

Blake Wheeler, who also is from Minnesota, assisted on the goal for his first point as a Ranger.

Later in the first, the Rangers killed three consecutive power plays, but the game had shifted in the Wild’s favor.

Minnesota scored twice in a 29-second span of the second. Ryan Hartman beat Quick at 5:57 and Joel Eriksson Ek made it 3-2 at 6:26.

Minnesota tied it at 1:41 of the third on a tip-in by former Ranger Mats Zuccarello, and when Marco Rossi scored at 5:20, Minnesota had its first lead.

Kreider tied it at 4 at 6:39 with a tip-in of his own and moved into fourth place on the all-time Rangers goal list with 273. He had been tied with Andy Bathgate.

Before the game, the Rangers said hello to three call-ups.

Forward Jonny Brodzinski rejoined the team from AHL Hartford to replace the injured Chytil, who on Friday was placed on injured reserve with an upper-body injury suffered in a 2-1 victory over Carolina on Thursday. Chytil will have to miss at least seven days.

Defenseman Connor Mackey was called up from Hartford to take the roster spot of Fox, who was placed on long-term injured reserve after a knee-to-knee collision with the Hurricanes’ Sebastian Aho in the same game. Mackey was a healthy scratch.

Fox will miss at least 10 games and 24 days.

The third player added from Hartford was goalie Louis Domingue, who backed up Quick.

Shesterkin was not in uniform because he came out of Thursday’s game “banged up,” Laviolette said on Saturday.

The nature of the banged-upness was not revealed. But Laviolette said the plan was always to start Quick against Minnesota.

When you go into game with an 8-2 record, you probably figure you can weather any injury absences, even troublesome ones to key players such as Fox and Chytil.

“We dealt with it pretty well in the second half of that game [on Thursday],” Jacob Trouba said. “Everyone’s going to have to step up a little bit more of a role. Missing some big players. Every team goes through it throughout the year, so now it’s our turn.”

By Anthony Rieber

anthony.rieber@newsday.comAnthonyRieber

Anthony Rieber covers baseball, as well as the NFL, NBA and NHL. He has worked at Newsday since Aug. 31, 1998, and has been in his current position since July 5, 2004.