Well, last night we did something that's probably been a long time coming: we were playing our third game in four nights, against an opponent with a similarly impressive record to our own, and leading 2-1 after 1, we got tired. We just stopped winning battles, all over the ice. There was a timeout in the middle of the second that didn't bounce us back. There were special teams efforts that didn't bounce us back. There was a second intermission that didn't bounce us back. We played almost all of the last two periods in our own zone, taking 6 minor penalties (3 by forwards) across these two periods (to the Kings' no minors), testing Lundqvist over and over again, even getting outshot 10-1 in the third.
Oh, and we won 4-2.
I don't like the phrase "the really good teams find a way to win." It's usually what the kinda good teams say when they get outplayed by a really good team but win anyway. The Rangers, for a chunk of last season, "found a way to win." We went up 3-1 over the Caps last spring by "finding a way to win" (his name was Henrik). Generally, if your team is "finding a way to win," it's on the brink of "losing a lot." That said, there are some pieces of good news that came out of us "finding a way to win" last night.
The obvious one is the one that comforted us through most of last season: Lundqvist remains elite, and as so many better-paid-than-I sportswriters have said, as long as he remains so, the Rangers will continue to be relevant. But there's more than that with this group. It's a lot easier to get outshot 10-1 in a period when your one shot is a lonely Marian Gaborik shot from the circle that finds its way to twine. And yeah, we took some bad penalties, but our PK unit was superb in killing 6 of 7. We just never got the momentum going.
This is kind of a weird, hard-to-substantiate claim, but it felt more like we just couldn't win the battles than that we weren't giving enough effort. Winning 3 games in 4 nights is hard work. And it's hard to complain about a team that has been playing like we've been playing. And it's not like we didn't win handily: we led for the entirety of these two "lazy" periods, and we led by two for over half of that, including the final 15:38 of the game. And had Gaborik not attempted an impossible pass through a defenseman to try to get Prospal the hat trick instead of just shooting at the open net himself, the game would have ended with a 3-goal cushion instead.
And, most importantly, no one is trying to pass along any illusions that this is how we want to win hockey games. Tortorella's reactions correctly diagnosed the game:
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You find a way to win one of these games when you're not on, and we were not on. It wasn't laziness, it has nothing to do with that; we were just a step behind. We tried, but we couldn't win battles. We couldn't catch up to them. We looked like a tired hockey club. We were a step behind in every facet, but we still found a way to win. We can't get spoiled. It's not easy winning games. Good teams win games like this, and we did. So that's a good sign.
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So, maybe I shouldn't be feeling so down on this win. As Michael Obernauer put it, "you won't find any argument from the Rangers that they were outworked and on their heels Wednesday night, easily the second-best team on the ice. But you also won't find any Rangers apologizing for taking the two points."
And you can't really argue with 28 goals for and 14 goals against to come up with 12 points in 7 games to start the season, can you?
Saturday night, we play the Leafs again. I'd like to repeat what we did to them Monday night. Oh, and Leafs fans and Islander fans: don't despair yet. You play each other November 23. That means one of you is bound to have a win in the books by Thanksgiving!
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