Struggling Rangers drop Game 4 to Devils

When they took their first loss against the Devils on Saturday night in Game 3 of this first-round playoff series, the Rangers all said everything was fine. They had played well, they insisted. It could have gone either way, they said. All they needed to do was keep doing what they had been doing and things would be OK.

That’s not the tune they were singing when they took their second loss of the series in Game 4 on Monday night.

“Not good enough. Not even close,’’ coach Gerard Gallant said after the Rangers fell, 3-1, again on home ice, as the Devils tied the best-of-seven series at two games apiece.

“The overtime game [Saturday] was a good hockey game,’’ a seething Gallant said. “It could have gone either way. But tonight wasn’t — it was a close hockey game, but . . . we didn’t show up. We didn’t play hard enough. We didn’t compete hard enough. And all we did was yap at the linesman for getting thrown out of the faceoffs. A lot of bad things.’’

Jonas Siegenthaler, the top-pair defenseman who had been a surprising healthy scratch by Devils coach Lindy Ruff in Game 2 on Thursday, scored the first playoff goal of his career at 8:22 of the third period to break a 1-1 tie.

Rookie goalie Akira Schmid had 22 saves for the Devils, who won both games at Madison Square Garden. Neither team has won a home game in the series. Game 5 will be at Prudential Center in Newark on Thursday at 7:30 p.m.

The Rangers looked as if they were well on the way to cruising through the series when they won the first two games last week in Newark by identical 5-1 scores. But their fortunes turned once the series changed venues.

Siegenthaler, who in the first period earned his first career playoff point with an assist on Jack Hughes’ breakaway goal that opened the scoring, beat Igor Shesterkin (20 saves) with a shot from the left circle that caromed in off the goalpost. That quieted a Garden crowd that had come to life when Vincent Trocheck’s goal at 1:42 of the third tied the score at 1-1.

Ondrej Palat scored into an empty net with 25.1 seconds remaining.

“We’ve just got to get back to play the way we played, I think, all year,’’ Rangers center Mika Zibanejad said. “We’ve got to trust ourselves . . . I think, just, the way we want to play, I don’t think we should change any of that. Maybe it’s easier said than done, but this reset, it’s the best out of three now.’’

The Devils shocked the Garden crowd by taking the lead at 2:50 of the opening period on Hughes’ goal, which came after Schmid foiled a couple of shots, first by Kaapo Kakko and then a tip of Adam Fox’s shot by Alexis Lafreniere.

After Schmid stopped Lafreniere’s shot, Siegenthaler lifted the rebound down the ice to spring Hughes, who made a forehand-backhand-forehand move and tucked the puck around Shesterkin for his third goal of the series.

Late in the period, Gallant decided to change things up a little bit, tweaking his top two forward lines. He switched his top two centers, Zibanejad and Trocheck, putting Zibanejad between Russian wingers Artemi Panarin and Vladimir Tarasenko and Trocheck between Chris Kreider and Patrick Kane.

But nothing the Rangers did seemed to work.

“Offensively, [we were] not competing and doing the right things,’’ Gallant said. “Tonight, our weak-side winger was a little bit lazy, and he stayed on the other side of the ice and watched the play instead of supporting it. How many times did you see us whipping pucks across and them picking them off in the middle?’’

What also didn’t help was the power play, which was such a weapon in the first two games of the series but has struggled in the last two. After going 4-for-10 in the two victories in Newark, the extra-man unit went 0-for-5 Saturday and 0-for-3 on Monday.

“We knew that it wasn’t going to be easy,’’ defenseman Ryan Lindgren said. “They did their job here. They played tough, they didn’t give us much offense. Their goalie played well, and we’ve just got to do a better job of creating chances next game.’’

By Colin Stephenson

colin.stephenson@newsday.comColinSNewsday

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.