MONTREAL — It was the first thing out of Tanner Glass’ mouth after the game, and it might have summed up the night.
“Expect the unexpected,” the Rangers’ hard-line winger said after he scored what would be the game-winning goal in his team’s 2-0 victory over the Canadiens in Game 1 of this best-of-seven first-round playoff series Wednesday night at Bell Centre.
As unexpected as Glass’ second career postseason goal was, a beauty of a rising backhand that hit the top corner, the performance of Henrik Lundqvist was exactly what everyone has come to expect this time of year.
The goalie is still the Rangers’ franchise bedrock and he was outstanding, keeping his team in the game during a disjointed opening 20 minutes and finishing off his 10th career postseason shutout with 31 saves. If this series comes as billed, the battle between two of the best goalies in the world in Lundqvist and Carey Price, then chalk the first round up to The King.
“I’ve had butterflies for two days. I’ve been thinking about this almost every hour,” Lundqvist said. “I’m just excited to get going.”
Well so are the Rangers, who now have their one game on the road to take away the Habs’ home-ice advantage. With the Blueshirts owning the best road record in the league this regular season along with the worst home record of any playoff team, taking a win up in the crazy din of 21,273 Francophiles was close to a necessity.
“I don’t think we really talked about it like that,” said captain Ryan McDonagh, who was a force in shutting down Montreal’s top line and limiting the Grade-A chances for his counterpart captain, Max Pacioretty. “We just talked about trying to get to our game as much as we could, trusting our structure and making the plays out of our zone that we needed to make.”
As far away as three years ago seems for this group of Rangers, this contest was eerily reminiscent of the previous postseason game they played here, the Blueshirts’ 1-0 victory in Game 6 of the 2014 Eastern Conference final, when another fourth-liner, Dominic Moore, scored the game-winner that sent his team to the Stanley Cup finals for the first time in 20 years.
That was also Lundqvist’s most recent postseason shutout, and that seems a long time coming.
“Henrik had to make some big saves,” McDonagh said, “but at the end of the day, we found our structure.”
Just as all of the Rangers’ recent postseason success, it is predicated on Lundqvist keeping them in the game and giving them a chance to win. This time, it was the first period, when the powerful pregame ceremony gave goose bumps en masse, and sent the Canadiens flying out of the gate, outshooting the Rangers, 16-5.
But none of them got past Lundqvist, and when Glass took a puck off an offensive-zone faceoff and beat Price’s glove up high, the 1-0 lead let some of the air out of the building.
“Obviously coming into this environment, we knew that the first period, they were going to come out hard,” coach Alain Vigneault said. “It was a real physical first period by both teams. We weathered the storm, and I thought we played extremely well after that, managed the puck better. That’s what we need to do.”
At the start of the second, the Rangers settled down and started holding the play. They matched the physicality of the Canadiens and started making better decisions with the puck. When Montreal got a power play late in the second, defenseman Shea Weber had what seemed like a tap-in goal on the back post that was denied by a diving save by Lundqvist.
“He’s just competing like he always does,” McDonagh said of his goalie. “It’s a good sign for us that we’re able to play well in front of him too.”
Of course, it’s just Game 1, finished off by an empty-netter from Michael Grabner with 1:10 remaining. The Rangers know there is a lot more work ahead, and got here after an inconsistent regular season. But through one game of the postseason, this seemed like old times — and certainly that was unexpected.