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DETROIT — The answer is no, the Rangers did not have enough good feeling leftover to easily absorb this one.
That was exemplified when Henrik Lundqvist shattered his stick over the crossbar after his Rangers blew a two-goal lead in the third period and Dylan Larkin scored the game-winner with 5.1 seconds remaining in the 3-on-3 overtime to give the Red Wings a 3-2 victory on Friday night at Little Caesars Arena.
The loss snapped the Rangers’ four-game winning streak and left Lundqvist pretty darn upset in this season of rebuilding, which has not even reached Thanksgiving.
“We played really well for a big part of this game,” Lundqvist said. “But this one hurts. … Yeah.”
Of course it hurts, because the Rangers (7-7-2) had convinced themselves that they knew how to close out games. Despite being a club that is focused more on the future than the present, they still believe they are good and can continue to win games. And they were doing that, opening their streak with two shootout wins in California followed by two more victories at the Garden earlier this week.
But all that good work can disappear quickly when a team plays a third period like th Rangers did, treating a 2-0 lead as if it didn’t exist — and the mistakes were appalling and aplenty.
“Just how we wilted,” is what head coach David Quinn said was most disappointing. “You think we learned lessons so far, and we just cheated the game. When you cheat the game with a 2-0 lead, you get that result. We got to learn lessons. We’ve got to learn lessons. You can’t cheat the game.”
After the Red Wings (6-8-2) won for the fifth time in their past six games, Quinn further explained exactly what he meant by cheating the game.
“When there’s a 50-50 puck, we’re thinking offense. Making ‘hope’ plays when we don’t need to. Forcing plays. Didn’t spend enough time in the offensive zone because when we got in the offensive zone, we tried to score a goal immediately instead of possessing it and understanding the situation,” Quinn said. “You don’t want to play safe, but you want to play smart. We didn’t do that.”
The game changed dramatically early in the third period, when Brendan Smith made a ghastly turnover at the side of his net, allowing Justin Abdelkader to score and cut the Rangers’ lead to 2-1 at 1:36.
“Their first goal changes everything,” Quinn said. “Just changes everything.”
The Rangers kept giving the Wings opportunities, and they eventually cashed in on one when Andreas Athanasiou burned everyone up the left wing and beat Lundqvist with a tidy backhand with just 2:02 remaining in regulation.
Afterward, when someone started to ask Quinn if it was similar to something, he cut the questioner off.
“L.A.? It’s exactly what happened against L.A.,” he said, referring to the tying goal against the Kings on Oct. 28 in the game that immediately preceded the winning streak. “We come on the ice and we stand in the neutral zone and they walk up the ice.”
The game had started with the Rangers all over Detroit, forcing the Red Wings to turn the puck over like crazy. But Jimmy Howard did his regular Jimmy Howard Against the Rangers routine, eventually stopping 28-of-30 shots. The only two that beat him were screened shots on a four-minute power play late in the second period, when both Kevin Shattenkirk and Neal Pionk got long shots to go in during a span of 40 seconds. It was the third game in a row in which the Rangers scored twice in less than a minute, but it hardly carried over into the third.
“It’s hockey. If you expect the game to look the same way for 60 minutes, I don’t think you’ve watched a hockey game before,” Lundqvist said. “It’s going to happen. It’s just frustrating the way it happened.”
When Larkin then scored by finishing a nice crossing feed from Athanasiou just before the overtime horn sounded, the frustration boiled over for these still-learning Blueshirts, who have to put it behind them before Saturday night’s game in Columbus, Ohio.
“We cheated,” Quinn said. “Our mindset cheats and we got what we deserved.”
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