They grabbed this one by the throat and never released their grip on this 4-1 Game 3 victory over the Senators at the Garden on Tuesday that had 19 sets of Blueshirt fingerprints all over it and more if you include the coaching staff.
Because while the Rangers played with authority out of the gate and were especially sharp at both lines with controlled exits and entries in unclogging the middle, Alain Vigneault enabled his team to play to its strengths in going with four lines buttressed by Tanner Glass’ re-entry into the lineup while elevating the Brady Skjei-Brendan Smith tandem into the second matchup assignment.
The coach had made another previous change at the start of the second period of Saturday’s double overtime Game 2 defeat when he reunited the Chris Kreider-Mika Zibanejad-Mats Zuccarello unit that had meshed so well very early and again in the middle of the year but had not been intact for a couple of months.
Z-Squared and Kid K, back together again in a performance in which they established the tempo early and had the upper hand throughout the match. They fit, the three of them do, and in this three-game snapshot of the conference semis that the Blueshirts trail 2-1 with Game 4 coming up Thursday on Broadway, Zibanejad has had the upper hand on Derick Brassard just as he finished the Montreal series with the upper hand on his opposing match after a halting start to the tournament.
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“The first three games I wasn’t too happy with, but I think I’ve been improving,” said Zibanejad, who leads his team in scoring with seven points (1-6) after setting up Zuccarello with a neat centering feed at 5:31 of the first for a 1-0 lead the Blueshirts would never relinquish. “For me, it comes down to just battling and just skating.
“I’m better when I play on instinct and don’t think too much.”
Zibanejad was all over the ice and on top of the puck throughout his 17:14, taking advantage of Zuccarello’s creativity and Kreider’s power game to cut through large swatches of open ice. This was the No. 93 that general manager Jeff Gorton and the Rangers envisioned when the club pulled off the July swap with Ottawa in which Brassard — outstanding in Game 1 but much less than that in Games 2 and 3 — went the other way.
This was also the effort envisioned by the Rangers in the aftermath of Saturday’s stinging 6-5 double overtime Game 2 defeat that seemed to leave the club stirred rather than shaken.
“It was important not to overreact,” said Henrik Lundqvist, extremely sharp throughout a 26-save performance. “As a group we kind of agreed not to change too much. We put what happened in Ottawa behind us. We were very focused.”
The Glass-Oscar Lindberg-J.T. Miller fourth line gave the Rangers an imposing ground game. Indeed, it was that unit whose extended cycle shift below the hash marks nine minutes into the first appeared to soften up the Senators’ underbelly two minutes before Michael Grabner stuffed one in for a 2-0 lead at 13:24.
It was rolling thunder out there for the Rangers, whose dozen forwards each got between 10:00 (Glass) and 15:12 (Zuccarello) of even-strength time and whose four lines fed off one another with a strong possession game allowing for good changes that helped to negate the Ottawa trap and stifle Erik Karlsson.
“I think we set the tone right away,” said Zuccarello, second in team scoring with six points (4-2). “We have older guys here whose leadership is key. Everyone was confident. We believe in ourselves.”
There is no reason for the Rangers not to believe after three games in which they have led for 104 minutes, been tied for 94:43 and have trailed for only the final 4:11 of Game 1. They don’t pay off on lead time any more than they pay off on Corsi, but no one can make the case that the Blueshirts have been chasing this series they trail but seem to be on top of.
“There is no question, I think, that we were the better team [in this game],” Lundqvist said. “We played with speed, emotion and determination. And we got it done. It was great to see.”
Thursday, against what surely will be a more committed Senators team, we will see if the Rangers can do it again. Because they kind of have to.