The puck bounded down the ice, hit the back of the empty net, and Henrik Lundqvist raised his arms and looked to the wheeled roof of the Garden in complete relief.
It was a long time coming, and it surely wasn’t pretty, but the Rangers and their franchise goaltender finally found a way to win.
“Let’s enjoy this Saturday,” Lundqvist said after he made 23 saves, stopping all nine shots he faced in the third period en route to a 4-2 victory over the Predators in a weekend Broadway matinee.
The Blueshirts have been telling themselves — and everyone that will listen — that they have been doing good things over the past week or so, and that their record wasn’t quite reflective. And then they managed to generate just six shots over the final two periods against Nashville, a Stanley Cup finalist last year, but the last one came from Jimmy Vesey and went into the empty net to take the Rangers to 2-5-2.
“I don’t think relief is the right word,” said coach Alain Vigneault, who certainly felt a small bit of pressure rise from his own shoulders. “But take the two points and get ready for the next game.”
If Vigneault had been in a better mood, he might have leaned on one of his favorite refrains, saying that all games can’t be Picasso’s. But part of what put his team in this early-season hole was their want to play pretty games and make fancy plays. What got them the win this time was simple plays early on and a penalty kill that denied all of the Predators’ five power plays.
“You definitely enjoy winning, and we haven’t been doing that a lot,” said Kevin Hayes, who played his best game of the season while scoring what would be the game-winning goal in the second period setting up Jesper Fast’s game-opening goal in the first. “Hopefully this is a springboard to a lot more.”
If that’s to be the case, the Rangers need to play a lot more like they did in the opening 20 minutes rather than the closing 40. After so many sloppy starts over the first eight games of the season — having given up the first goal twice on the first shot of the game and three times on the third shot of the game — they came out steady in this one. They even got a power-play goal from Chris Kreider, his first of the season, with 26 seconds remaining in the first period to take a 2-0 lead, the first multi-goal lead they held since their lone other win, the 2-0 shutout of the Canadiens back on Oct. 8.
But it was hardly perfect. Mattias Ekholm made it 2-1 at 1:44, and after Hayes made it 3-1 at 12:46 when his rare burst of speed wide set up a nifty high forehand finish — “Not too often I beat guys wide,” Hayes said with a smile — the Predators came back with a deflected goal from Filip Forsberg that fluttered over Lundqvist and snuck over the goal line at 15:30 of the second.
“You can do so many good things to try to get confidence and try to get a good feeling in here,” Lundqvist said, “but in the end, it comes down to winning games.”
Holding a 3-2 lead in the third, the Blueshirts survived a nerve-wracking penalty kill after Brendan Smith was somehow called for a delay-of-game penalty after Scott Hartnell shoved him into the Rangers’ net and it came off the moorings. But then Vesey fed one into the empty Nashville net with 39 seconds left, and the Rangers finally had their second win.
“I think I’d rather play bad and win,” Lundqvist said, “than play great and lose.”