The Rangers’ front office is rightfully planning for the future, but the proud athletes on the bench and the man who stands behind them on a nightly basis are not giving up. Not yet.
Coach Alain Vigneault was as demonstrative as he has been all season just hours before his Rangers came back to beat the Flames, 4-3, at the Garden on Friday night. He said beforehand he needed more consistency from his goaltending, and that is a testament to the thin line this group walks every night, needing excellence between the pipes just to have a chance.
And when that has slipped just a bit, the Rangers go through droughts like the one that has brought them to this point, at which team president Glen Sather and general manager Jeff Gorton publicly declared Thursday that going into the Feb. 26 trade deadline, they are focused on the future rather than on trying saving this season.
But that seemed to light a fire under Vigneault, as the normally reserved headman gave an impassioned vow that his team is not about to roll over and die just because they had come in having lost seven of eight, were riddled with injuries, and knew some impactful trades were coming.
“I’ll tell you what I told my GM, what I told my president, what I told my owner — I’m going to try to win every game,” Vigneault said. “That’s what we have to do as a group.”
Vigneault decided the best way to get starter Henrik Lundqvist back on track was to give him Friday night off. That lasted only 20 minutes because Ondrej Pavelec left after the first period with a knee injury. And after some shaky early moments, Lundqvist settled down — and so did those around him.
With third period goals from Rick Nash and Mika Zibanejad, the Rangers (26-24-5) turned a 3-2 deficit into a 4-3 lead and secured just their second win in the past nine games and just their fourth win in regulation since Dec. 19.
“I’m not a huge fan of coming in [mid-game],” said Lundqvist, who stopped 28-of-30 shots after he had been pulled on three of his past five starts. “It was a game I just had to battle, especially coming off my last performance. I felt like, ‘Don’t think too much, just play, just battle.’ ”
And really, that’s what the Rangers did. Because if they were thinking too much about the deadline and what their locker room might look like in a few weeks, they wouldn’t have come out as hard as they did when they outshot the Flames (28-19-8) by a margin of 20-8 in the opening 20 minutes. They would haven’t fought back when Kevin Hayes’ first-period goal was negated by one from Brett Kulak, and then when Michael Grabner’s second-period goal was erased by Lundqvist’s poke-check blunder on Curtis Lazar just 45 seconds later.
And they would have crumbled when Matt Tkachuk gave the Flames a 3-2 lead on a power-play goal with just 1:32 remaining in the second period.
But they didn’t. Lundqvist made two jaw-dropping saves in the third period against Sean Monahan and Mikael Backlund, and his team fought back to finally win one.
“It’s an emotional win for everyone in here,” Mats Zuccarello said. “We need to get some confidence in the group and some positivity in here. I thought we responded well to whatever is happening lately and we played for each other.”
With all of this going on, the Rangers are just three points out of the second wild-card spot with 27 games left in the regular season, starting with a two-game road trip that begins in Winnipeg on Sunday. The roster is only going to get more depleted, and the competition is only going to get more fierce.
Vigneault is going to look to Lundqvist to carry this team forward, and they’re not about to throw in towel — no matter who else is in the locker room.
“I can’t answer for the players, but I do know for myself, if I were a player, I would be looking at the standings, seeing that we’re three points out of the playoffs,” Vigneault said. “You can be sure I’d be coming ready, coming out and working hard.”