Fired-up Rangers top Avalanche in shootout
All season long, Rangers coach David Quinn has been searching for the right combination of players who would give him what he wanted: grit, strong defense, shots and goals.
Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden, against the Avalanche, the rookie coach finally seemed to be getting somewhere, as his team played perhaps its most complete game of the young season, combining a sound defense with a hard-driving attack and a good level of physicality that had to make Quinn happy.
He got even happier when Henrik Lundqvist made a left skate save on Gabriel Landeskog on the final attempt of the shootout to give the Rangers their second victory of the season, 3-2, in the front end of a back-to-back that concludes Wednesday in Washington against the defending Stanley Cup champion Capitals.
In the second overtime game of the three-game homestand, Mats Zuccarello and Kevin Shattenkirk scored on the first and third shots for the Rangers, with Mikko Rantonen getting the only shootout goal for the Avalanche on the second shot.
For the sixth straight game, Quinn changed his lineup, taking out enigmatic forward Pavel Buchnevich and defenseman Adam McQuaid. Neal Pionk returned after being scratched the previous two games, and Cody McLeod replaced Buchnevich.
Quinn also shuffled his forward lines and defense pairings again, moving 19-year-old rookie Filip Chytil to the left wing on a second line with center Kevin Hayes and right wing Zuccarello and promoting Vlad Namestnikov to the third line, on the right of Jimmy Vesey and rookie Brett Howden.
“We’ve got to have more of a grit element to our game, offensively,’’ Quinn said. “We’ve got to get to the net. There’s got to be less ‘BS’ to our game, offensively. We’ve got to have more of a shooter’s mentality.’’
The Rangers responded with their best first period of the season, outshooting the Avalanche 19-7 and taking a 1-0 lead on a power-play goal by Chris Kreider, who tipped in a shot from Shattenkirk at 12:07 for his third goal of the season. The Rangers finally seemed to take Quinn’s constant harping about shooting the puck to heart, and they looked to launch shots early and often from almost anywhere inside the offensive zone, as soon as they got a clean look at the goal.
The visitors would find their legs and get back in the game in the second period, though. The Avalanche tied it at 1 on a power-play goal of their own, a tip-in by Tyson Jost at 8:13, with Hayes sitting out a tripping penalty. But Hayes redeemed himself and got the lead back for the Rangers when he unleashed a wicked one-timer from above the right circle off a pass from Zuccarello at 10:53.
Though Colorado would end up outshooting the Rangers in the second period, it appeared the Rangers would take that lead into the second intermission when Lundqvist made stunning saves back to back, on a point shot by Matt Calvert and the rebound try by Matt Nieto with less than 20 seconds to play. But Nathan MacKinnon tipped in a shot with 12.6 seconds remaining for his seventh goal to tie it at 2. The teams went scoreless in the third period.
Colin Stephenson covers the Rangers for Newsday. He has spent more than two decades covering the NHL and just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
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