Is it that shocking when it was like this all season?
For one last time, the Rangers gave just enough to make it seem like they had a chance. And for one last time, they proved they didn’t have what it takes.
It was a 4-2 loss to the Senators in Game 6 of their second-round series on Tuesday night at the Garden that ended their inconsistent season. If you put an amplifier to the sound of this death, you might have heard a whimper.
“Right now all you feel is disappointment and it’s a numb feeling,” said goalie Henrik Lundqvist. “It’s not a good feeling.”
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And so it ends. It ends for the 2016-17 Rangers…
There was a quiet confidence to the Rangers coming into this game, having won 15 of their previous 20 elimination games, and 10 of their past 11 do-or-die games at the Garden. But now the three most recent times the Blueshirts have faced elimination? All losses.
The Stanley Cup victory in 1994 still hangs around this franchise like an albatross. It always will until a team comes along that is good enough to add the franchise’s second championship since 1940.
This team, despite leading for the majority of the series, was not good enough to beat the trapping Senators. Nor was it good enough get over the superlative play of Ottawa captain Erik Karlsson, who might have limped off the Garden ice with two hairline fractures in his left heel, but was without a doubt the best player on the ice throughout.
“I don’t know if you can say we were the better team because they won at the end of the day,” said Rick Nash, who spoke with a wrap around his right knee after not being the same force he was in the six-game first-round victory over the Canadiens. “We had lots of leads in games, especially on the road, and we couldn’t close it out. We’ve got to give them credit. They were able to find ways to win games.”
Another way to put that: The Rangers found ways to lose games.
Nash was quick to pull up those nightmares in Ottawa — Game 1, Karlsson scores the game-winner on a bank shot off the back of Lundqvist’s head with 4:11 remaining; Game 2, a 5-3 lead disappears with under four minutes remaining in regulation resulting in an overtime loss; Game 5, old pal Derick Brassard ties it with 1:26 remaining and another overtime loss.
Then there was this one, in front of their fans, going down 2-0 in the first period and needing to scratch and claw their way back just to have a chance. Which they did, a reminder this was still the same group that surprised many in earning 102 points in the regular season in the toughest division in the NHL. This was also a team that also found a way to come back from 2-1 series deficit and beat Carey Price and the Canadiens while dealing with the din of the Bell Centre.
They didn’t fold after goals from Mike Hoffman and Mark Stone, with former Senator Mika Zibanejad giving the Garden some life with a breakaway goal at 13:22 of the second period to cut the deficit to 2-1.
The good feeling lasted just 2:21 of game time. That’s how long it took for Karlsson to once again become a one-man wrecking crew, eventually beating his fellow Swede, Lundqvist, with a quick one-timer from in close to take a 3-1 lead into the third period.
“To go down 2-0 in an elimination game, it’s tough to bounce back,” Nash said. “I thought it was killer to come back 2-1 and it was the next shift, or two shifts later — it just can’t happen with all of that momentum to give them that 3-1 goal.”
Yet again the Rangers pushed, with a Chris Kreider sighting early in the third, the mercurial winger scoring 53 seconds into the period to the cut the lead to 3-2. But that was all the Senators were giving, and Jean-Gabriel Pageau ended it into the empty net with 6.2 seconds remaining to send the Rangers off into the summer.
“We have nobody to blame but ourselves,” said captain Ryan McDonagh, “and that’s the truth of the situation.”