No apologies necessary if you intermittently nodded off during this one, but unfortunately for the Rangers, the points count just the same now as they will in the spring.
So the only real question is the level of concern after a few early mistakes and some sleepy hockey led to a 3-1 loss to the Blues on Tuesday night at the Garden and dropped the Blueshirts to 1-3-0 to start the season.
“There has to be [concern],” Rick Nash said. “With all these home games early on, these are the games when you get to March and April that really mean something. There’s definitely an urgency to fix this and start winning some games.”
The biggest thing for the Rangers to fix is their starts, as they’ve come out of the gate in each of their first four matches with little jump and with flights of fancy on their brains. None was more drastic than this one, when a turnover from Brady Skjei off the opening draw led to Carl Gunnarsson giving St. Louis a 1-0 lead just 15 seconds into the game.
“Almost every game, in our first three or four shifts, we’ve struggled,” Nash said. “I don’t think there’s any changes inside the room [before the game], but in past years, we were just simple. You look at the plays we tried to make early on, they’re kind of complicated plays and end up turning over the puck.”
Trying to make fancy plays and forgetting about puck management or defending their own end is what led to the Rangers losing the first two games of the season. It created a slight panic in their world, especially after the 8-5 thumping in Toronto on Saturday.
“We’re trying to put together a full game here and we haven’t done that very much at all in any game,” captain Ryan McDonagh said. “It’s getting to a handful of games now where we need to start finding that right from the start.”
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It didn’t take long for the Rangers to stabilize things, when just over two minutes into the game they tied it, 1-1, with another power-play goal from Mika Zibanejad. It was his fifth of the season and fourth on the man-advantage that is now 5-for-16 (31.3 percent) to begin the year.
There was also relative stability in goal, with Henrik Lundqvist following his 34-save shutout against the Canadiens on Sunday night with some stellar plays when needed, none better than the left-pad stop on Paul Stastny at 6:35 of the third period that was so close to going in it had to be reviewed and upheld as a no-goal.
But Lundqvist couldn’t stop Brayden Shenn from banking one in from behind the net off what he thought was his skate, a power-play goal at 13:30 of the first period that made it 2-1 and actually stood up as the game-winner as the teams slogged through a mind-numbing and scoreless second period.
“Honestly, I don’t know how that found the net,” Lundqvist said of Schenn’s goal. “It was obviously frustrating to see it go in.”
The Rangers had a handful of chances in the third period, but couldn’t get any of their 16 shots in that final frame past St. Louis backup goalie Carter Hutton, who finished with 32 saves.
“We’ve been getting goals,” Zibanejad said, “but unfortunately we need to get the more important goals late in the game.”
What the Rangers really need to start getting is a couple wins. They have two days of practice before they play the Blue Jackets in Columbus on Friday night, and if it keeps up this way, the season could quickly get away from them.
“We lost a few games,” Lundqvist said. “It’s important that we get the urgency and realize how important the next game is and the game after that. You have to see it as a big game every night.”