This one would’ve hurt. Instead, the Rangers managed to pick up their second win of this season in rather dramatic fashion.
After the Blueshirts held the play for most of the game — and Henrik Lundqvist allowed just two goals in regulation, both on double-deflections — they ended up walking out with a 3-2 shootout victory against the Avalanche on Tuesday night at the Garden.
The game-winner came when Kevin Shattenkirk scored in the third round of the skills competition, and then Lundqvist stopped Colorado captain Gabriel Landeskog to seal the deal.
The Rangers (2-4-0) had gotten off to a rather ugly start under first-year head coach David Quinn, who finally got them to defend in the 2-1 loss to the Oilers on Saturday, but couldn’t get them to continue to be offensively aggressive. That wasn’t much of a problem against the Avalanche (2-2-2), who were beginning a four-game road trip.
The third period started with the two teams knotted, 2-2, and the play was pretty tight throughout the final 20 minutes. When neither team could score, the Rangers managed to at least secure their second game of the season with a point, as it went into the extra period.
They got a great opportunity to win in early in the 3-on-3 extra period, when just 20 seconds in Brady Skjei drew a holding penalty on Nathan MacKinnon. But they couldn’t score on a power play, just as Jimmy Vesey couldn’t manage to beat Colorado goalie Semyon Varlamov with a great chance and 1:40 remaining.
After the Avalanche hit two posts in the final minutes, the first from Gabriel Landeskog and the second from MacKinnon, the game went to the shootout.
The Rangers had opened the game with arguably their best period of the season, dominating the Avalanche en route to outshooting them, 19-7. They were only afforded a 1-0 lead, though, as a Chris Kreider deflection resulted in a power-play goal at 12:07.
Colorado managed to tie it, 1-1, when a Tyson Jost tip was then deflected again by Landeskog for a power-play goal of their own at 8:13 of the second period. That came after a tripping penalty from Kevin Hayes, and Hayes quickly redeemed himself when he fired a spectacular one-timer from the top of the right circle, giving his team 2-1 lead at 10:53 of the second.
It seemed like the Rangers were going to preserve that lead when Lundqvist made a sequence of jaw-dropping saves with about 20 seconds left, the first a Matt Calvert tip and then on the rebound chance from Matt Nieto. Yet the Blueshirts iced the puck after that, and on the ensuing face-off, a long shot from Mikko Rantanen was double-tipped (again), this time from Landeskog and then Nathan MacKinnon, tying it 2-2 with just 12.6 remaining in the period.
It was that deflating feeling and the tie score that the Rangers took into the third before winning it in thrilling fashion.
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