In Ottawa, the New York Rangers waited until the final five minutes of their game with the Senators on Saturday to finally their offense together for a 3-2 win.
The Senators held a 2-0 lead in the game until the Rangers broke through with three unanswered goals.
Nick Paul scored with just 41 seconds gone in the game for a 1-0 lead to Ottawa.
“Real tough,” Ottawa head coach D.J. Smith said. “[Forsberg] sat [on the bench] all day and then six minutes to go, you’re going in there freezing cold. Four-on-four, we just let [Lindgren] stand there and bang one in the back door. You’ve got to be more desperate at the end of the game and then certainly with a goalie that hasn’t seen a shot all night.”
Josh Norris seemingly put a bow on a win for the Senators with 64 seconds gone in the third period for the 2-0 lead.
“I thought we carried the play for 54 minutes,” Smith said. “Made some bad plays and ultimately end up losing a game that you shouldn’t lose.”
That may have been true, but those final minutes cost the Sens the lead and the game.
“That’s a game we should’ve had,” Paul said. “Not the greatest third and we let the momentum swing.”
Chris Kreider started the rally with a power-play goal off a nifty pass from Artemi Panarin to cut the deficit to one goal.
Ryan Lindgren tied the game 75 seconds after Kreider scored.
“It just goes to show that when you’re down 2-0 like that, late in a game, you never know what could happen,” Lindgren said. “We get a power play and that gets us on the board, and we just never stopped fighting. I think that’s such a big component of our team; we’ve got 20 guys out there that compete and never believe that we’re out of games.”
The Rangers were that all game all game long for the efforts of Alexander Georgiev who made 26 saves for the win.
“[Georgiev] was great,” Lindgren said. “Obviously, a lot of key saves. In the second period, there were some saves that were for sure goals, and he came across and made some great saves.”
Barclay Goodrow completed the rally at 17:57 for the lead and win.
“After the second period, we knew we weren’t playing the best,” Goodrow said. “We knew that we were going to have to string together a good 20 (minutes) to even have a chance to tie it up or come out with the win, so I felt like we really put our work boots on in the third period.”
The Rangers swept all four games of their road trip.
“We’re starting to show we have that never-give-up mentality,” Goodrow said. “Obviously, we would like to put ourselves in a better position heading into the third, but the resiliency that we did show in kind of forgetting about the first two (periods) and starting the third like it was a fresh game, it’s pretty good to see. Nice to know that we have a lot of character in the room.”
Matt Murray made 22 saves in the loss.
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