Rangers' four-game winning streak ends with loss to Bruins

The Rangers can’t win them all, but they must win many of them to make a late push for a playoff berth. So there is no getting around the fact that Sunday’s 3-1 loss to the Bruins at Madison Square Garden was a setback.

Still, there was no shame in it. The Bruins lead the NHL with 86 points, and the Rangers had won four in a row before Sunday.

When it was over, the losers were disappointed but philosophical.

“You’re not going to win every game in this league; sometimes that’s just how it goes,” said Jacob Trouba, who figured prominently in the first two Boston goals. “But if we play like that every night, I think that’s a game we can win more games than we’ll lose with.”

Coach David Quinn said: “Listen, this team came one game away from winning the Stanley Cup [in 2019] and they’re hungry. They’ve played great all year . . . There’s a reason they’ve got the most points in the league.”

Next up for the Rangers: Games against the Blackhawks, Hurricanes and Sharks, and big decisions surrounding the Feb. 24 trade deadline. They remained seven points out of a playoff spot.

The first sign it was not the Rangers’ day came at 19:18 of the first period, when the Bruins scored a goal that Quinn called “a kick in the [butt].”

Charlie McAvoy, who is from Long Beach, sent a puck toward the net that deflected off Mika Zibanejad, then off the left arm of Trouba, at which point it rose in a soft, high arc.

Rangers goaltender Alexandar Georgiev, starting his third game in a row, attempted to grab the puck out of the air with his glove hand, but he flailed at it and missed, and it rolled down his left arm and landed behind him.

Initially the goal was given to Chris Wagner, as the puck first appeared to have deflected off him. It later was ruled to have hit Zibanejad, giving McAvoy his third goal of the season unassisted.

“It was a pretty tough bounce; you don’t see those many times,” said Georgiev, who had 31 saves. “I couldn’t track it that well. I just saw that it was really high up and tried to grab it with my glove.”

Trouba said: “Not too often you see one pop up in the air and go over the goalie and into the net. Not much you can do about that. Just shake it off.”

The Rangers had a chance to tie it five minutes into the second period when the Bruins’ David Krejci was given a double-minor for high-sticking Ryan Lindgren in the face, drawing blood under Lindgren’s right eye. But the Rangers were ineffective during the four-minute power play, drawing boos.

Brad Marchand was penalized for cross-checking Lindgren from behind late in the second, but even that turned out badly for the Rangers.

Trouba lost the puck to Charlie Coyle at the blue line and Coyle skated in alone, beating Georgiev to the glove side for a shorthanded goal that made it 2-0 at 18:42 of the second.

“Just kind of a rolling puck,” Trouba said. “I had the decision to whack at it or try to corral it a little bit and get it over to Brady Skjei]. It just bounced on me . . . It is what it is. Tough play.”

The Rangers broke through at 9:52 of the third when Zibanejad scored a power-play goal, beating former Islanders goalie Jaroslav Halak to his stick side from the blue line. Artemi Panarin, who led the Rangers with 24:51 of ice time, recorded his 49th assist.

But Halak held firm after that. He made 25 saves and improved to 22-8-1 in his career against the Rangers. An empty-netter by Patrice Bergeron at 19:47 iced it.

Zibanejad lamented the Rangers’ mistakes, saying, “You can’t do that against a team like that. I think for the most part we did a lot of good things, just couldn’t generate the offensive side as we have of late. It’s frustrating.”

By Neil Best

neil.best@newsday.com@sportswatch

Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.