The only game in the NHL on Monday featured the San Jose Sharks visiting Madison Square Garden and the New York Rangers.
The Sharks were playing their fourth and final game of a road trip and had been riding the hot hand of Martin Jones in net.
The Rangers started Antti Raanta for the first time this season in place of Henrik Lundqvist.
Raanta responded to the start with a 22-save performance en route to a 4-0 Rangers win.
“It’s nice to get this kind of start,” Raanta said. “I knew what Cam Talbot did here last year. Of course, everybody is going to compare me to him. That’s how it goes in the hockey world, everybody is always expecting you to be better than the last one. I tried to play and enjoy the game, don’t think about those things too much. It was fun to start like this, but there is more to work on. It wasn’t a perfect game, but it was nice.”
The Rangers goal scorers were Marc Staal, Jesper Fast, Mats Zuccarello, and Viktor Stalberg.
“We had more energy in the room going into the game and it felt like everyone was committed to turning the tides a little bit,” Staal said. “The way we were playing, we weren’t happy with it. I thought we did a good job of raising our level of play.”
Any kind of energy would have been better than the lackluster effort in the loss to the New Jersey Devils on Sunday.
Part of lackadaisical effort through a three-game losing streak was being outscored after the first period 8-0.
“We’ve all been talking about it, players and coaches, about putting a 60-minute game on the ice,” Rangers coach Alain Vigneault said. “We’re not going to be perfect. We’re not going to always make the play. When you don’t make the play, for whatever reason, you need the save, and we got the save tonight. I thought we had some better looks offensively. I thought we tried to get more pucks toward the net.”
The complete game effort from the Rangers included a good defensive push that limited the Sharks attack.
“There weren’t any 2-on-1s like we had [been giving up],” Raanta said. “I think [Lundqvist] made like 15 saves on 2-on-1s the last two games. You can see from those situations, when everybody is behind the puck and when we lost the puck in the offensive zone there were always three guys coming back and the fourth and fifth forward were also coming back. That was really good today.”
Martin Jones made 24 saves in his fist loss of the season.
“We lost pretty much every facet of the game,” Sharks coach Peter DeBoer said. “Lost races to pucks. Lost battles. Lost the special teams battle. There’s a price to pay to win and the other team was more willing to pay that price tonight than us, so we got what we deserved.”
Lost in the euphoria of the win was the fact that neither Rick Nash nor Chris Kreider has scored for the Rangers this season.
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