It doesn’t matter where this Game 3 of the opening round was played. There is no excuse whatsoever for the puny performance the Rangers trotted out onto the Garden ice in their 3-1 defeat to the Canadiens on Sunday night.
What a disappointment.
What a letdown.
“We didn’t play up to our standards at all,” Mats Zuccarello said after the defeat left the Blueshirts with a 2-1 series deficit heading into Tuesday’s Game 4. “This was not good enough from anyone, including on my part. We all have to be better.”
The lone exception being Henrik Lundqvist, now in his 12th season of masking his team’s deficiencies. The King did what he could for as long as he could behind a team that played without any visible sense of urgency and could not muster the energy and will that are required for the postseason, but ultimately was unable to pull off a one-man show any more than the goaltender could in the 4-3 Game 2 overtime loss in Montreal in which he made 54 saves.
“I think it’s important we start with ourselves and not look at what they are doing,” Lundqvist said. “Let’s start with ourselves. Yes, they are a good team. We have to give more at home, in the playoffs, or we aren’t going to win. We need more. It’s as simple as that.”
The Blueshirts have lost six straight home games in the playoffs dating back to Game 2 of the 2015 conference finals against Tampa Bay in which they have been outscored 21-4. Until Brady Skjei ruined Carey Price’s shutout with 2:06 remaining after the Blueshirts pulled Lundqvist with 3:58 to go in the third while down 3-0, the Rangers’ home scoreless streak in the postseason had reached an unfathomable 157:15. They have scored 33 goals in eight road games during the same time frame.
“We shouldn’t be tight at home. We talk about staying loose and enjoying the moment,” Zuccarello said. “I wish I had the answer.”
This one might as well have been played on another planet, let alone another country from the first two in Montreal in which the Blueshirts played with heart and soul in getting a split in a pair of contentious, breathtaking games played in an electric environment. All of that evaporated at the Garden, which, since its extensive face-lift was completed prior to 2013-14, has become the quietest building in the entire league either because of the architecture or because the most ardent fans have been priced out.
But that is no excuse for the Rangers, who never made anything happen and never were able to nudge Price out of the comfort zone in which he existed while facing 14 shots over the first 52:07, none in an 8:00 stretch starting at 4:07 of the third period. The game could be played on the moon and you wouldn’t be able to come up with a pretext for such an abysmal team-wide effort.
The power play was dysfunctional while failing on three advantages on which three shots were generated. The penalty kill allowed two goals on three times down, an uncovered Artturi Lehkonen snapping one from the left past Lundqvist to break a scoreless tie at 17:37 of the second with J.T. Miller in the box for a faceoff violation in the offensive zone before Shea Weber increased the lead to 2-0 at 7:42 of the third with Zuccarello serving the back end of a double minor he incurred for high-sticking Andrei Markov.
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Mika Zibanejad was simply dreadful while spending his night on the perimeter until he spent much of the third period on the bench, put there by coach Alain Vigneault. Kevin Hayes played passively again. And with Derek Stepan fighting it all night, Oscar Lindberg emerged as the Rangers’ best center.
Chris Kreider was more involved than he had been in Montreal in clearing a very low bar, and might actually have changed the course of the game had he put home Zuccarello’s perfect backdoor feed 3:30 into the match instead of tapping it wide, but No. 20 was still not quite assertive enough. Rick Nash was probably the Rangers’ best forward, but that’s kind of like naming a one-eyed man King in the land of the blind.
“We are going to need our best from everyone and myself. We need our best from 20 guys,” Lundqvist said. “That’s the only way for us to win the next game.”
Long ago, the Rangers used to get kicked out of the Garden during the playoffs by the circus and played their “home” games either on the road or at a neutral site.
Where are Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey when you need them?