EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — It will be one more start for Antti Raanta, his eighth straight Saturday against the Kings in Los Angeles, before Henrik Lundqvist regains the net Sunday in Anaheim against the Ducks.
“I feel good, but when you come back, you can’t expect to feel perfect right away,” Lundqvist said, referring to personal experience from a couple of years ago when he struggled in his first game after missing nearly two months with a vascular neck injury. “I’ll focus on the little things and build game-by-game and grow my confidence. It’s a matter of feel.”
Lundqvist is expected to play Sunday and then Tuesday in San Jose.
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Coach Alain Vigneault set up the rotation this way so that the King could get in a morning skate Saturday after having been sidelined with a hip injury he suffered during his 43-save, 5-2 victory in Florida.
“I miss the game, miss being out there and competing,” said Lundqvist, who should start five or six of the club’s final seven games. “The first game, I might be a little rusty, but I’m confident there is enough time for me to be ready for the playoffs. “Everyone can feel that the playoffs are getting close, but you also have to focus on the here and now.”
Vigneault tweaked the forward combinations, reuniting the Michael Grabner-Kevin Hayes-J.T. Miller third line combination while moving Jimmy Vesey up with Mika Zibanejad and Rick Nash, dropping Jesper Fast onto the fourth line with Oscar Lindberg and a reinstated Pavel Buchnevich and keeping the Chris Kreider-Derek Stepan-Mats Zuccarello unit intact.
“I feel this gives us more of a balance with our four lines,” Vigneault said. “With three games in four days, I want to be able to roll four lines.”
The Rangers worked on their dysfunctional penalty kill that has allowed goals in eight straight games (10 on 26 disadvantages).
“During the year we practice the power play more often while we do a lot of the PK off-ice in video sessions,” the coach said. “We did go over video also, but I wanted to get some work in on the ice where we had some different looks and worked on some different reads.”