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The Rangers took a stroll down the path of least resistance in Boston on Thursday night and wound up smacking right into a dead end of a 4-0 defeat to the Bruins that reflected well on nobody.
Alexandar Georgiev, pulled from his second consecutive start and his third in 11 assignments this season, unaccountably gave up another long one that put the Blueshirts in a 1-0 hole after 4:14 that must have been filled with quicksand, given the way the club was just swallowed up by it.
The club generated little offense at five-on-five and few scoring chances against Jaroslav Halak. The work without the puck when the Bruins had possession was faulty. The team was unable to consistently get the puck deep and therefore unable to get in on the forecheck. Fifty-fifty battles were weighted about 70-30 for Boston.
The power play was wooden, impotent and worse than that in surrendering a shorthanded goal for the second consecutive game, this one from Patrice Bergeron off a Brad Marchand feed at 17:34 that made it 2-0 and pretty much ended the competition phase of the evening.
“That was just the back breaker in a lot of ways. You could just sense it,” said David Quinn, far more sanguine than would have been expected. “That shorthanded goal was way too easy.”
The coach and the two players who came to the podium for Zoom questioning, Brendan Smith and Jacob Trouba, all managed to put positive spins on the performance. All talked about how the club stuck with it and competed all the way to the finish line. Perhaps they even believed it. Perhaps they need to believe it with their season on the edge.
It’s three straight defeats now against the Penguins and Bruins following three straight victories achieved against the Sabres and Devils. Just when it became necessary to step up in class, the Rangers have taken a pratfall nearing the halfway mark of the season with the playoff cut line nine points away.
“I think we have to have more urgency and understand how quickly this season is going to come upon us,” said Quinn, whose team’s 10-13-2 mark represents the franchise’s worst 25-game record since the never-lamented 2002-03 team had the very same results. “We’ve got to make sure we stop the bleeding.”
A tourniquet might be needed for Georgiev, who surrendered a pair of goals within 1:21 early in the second period, Boston scoring on the power play at 3:31 and then at even-strength at 4:52 to both build a 4-0 lead and chase the goaltender after he’d seen 14 shots.
The 25-year-old Bulgarian-born netminder had been pulled twice in 71 starts over his first three seasons. He has been pulled three times in 11 starts this season, and has developed a penchant for surrendering not only long ones, but goals in bunches.
Three starts ago, the Devils scored twice in 17 seconds. Last start, the Penguins scored three goals in 1:01. Now this for Georgiev, who faced 14 shots on Thursday, has allowed seven goals on 20 shots over 42:06 in his last two games and 14 goals on 102 shots in 226:03 (.863, 3.72) over his last five starts.
Teams cannot win when they never know when one is going in. That throws off everyone’s equilibrium. Of all of this season’s unexpected developments, goaltending issues rank second on the surprise list, trailing only Mika Zibanejad’s null-and-void opening eight weeks. Igor Shesterkin’s status remains unknown for Saturday as he continues to rehab his groin strain.
Artemi Panarin may rejoin the fray on Saturday and in fact, probably will. Perhaps No. 10’s return after having missed nine games will inspire his teammates to greater heights. Then, too, it should not be difficult at all for the Rangers to raise their level following this flatline performance.
Quinn shuffled his lines fairly early in the second period, reuniting the Chris Kreider-Zibanejad-Pavel Buchnevich unit that has become a go-to staple for the coach when his team is in trouble. But the titular first line generated little. Zibanejad may have had a strong shift here or there, but was a cipher most of the time.
Maybe the most encouraging news of the night was Filip Chytil’s ability to take faceoffs after deferring for the first six games of his return from the broken hand he suffered in the season’s fifth game. But Chytil’s game was subpar, illustrated by the way David Krejci was able to easily take the puck away from No. 72 behind the New York net before setting up Jake DeBrusk for the 4-0 goal at 4:52 of the second.
But he was part of a crowd that included pretty much everyone, notably Ryan Strome and Alexis Lafreniere. Kaapo Kakko, by the way, went without a goal for his 14th straight game. Again, though, this was on everyone.
So the Blueshirts try again on Saturday. They might want to take a different path this time.
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