Well, it had to end sooner or later, and for the New York Rangers it was not nearly soon enough, but they’ll take it.
On Thursday night, the Rangers ended a five game skid with a 6-2 thumping of the visiting Buffalo Sabres.
Ryan Strome struck for two goals, his first goals of the season, in the win.
“Sometimes it’s a game like this that can get you out of a little bit of a rut,” Strome said. “Hopefully we can get going.”
New York took a 3-0 lead in the period on goals from Artemi Panarin off a steal in the neutral zone, Brett Howden and Strome’s first.
“Where we were at mentally it was a big deal to get the first goal,” Rangers had coach David Quinn said.
Henrik Lundqvist made 31 saves to get the win.
Marco Scandella and Vladimir Sobotka scored for the Sabres.
“We put ourselves in the hole for sure with the puck management, or lack of,” Sabres head coach Ralph Krueger said.
The Rangers held a team meeting Wednesday after practice to get some issues settled after going 0-4-1.
“I give our leaders a ton of credit, they took the bull by the horns,” Quinn said. “There certainly were some heated discussions [Wednesday]. They all looked in the mirror and realized what we needed to do.
“You can have all the meetings you want, you’ve got to apply it. I thought the practice was as good of a practice as we had in a while. There was a great mental and physical purpose to the practice. It was only for a half-hour, but I think when that practice ended they felt good. They felt good about the things we had worked on and it carried over.”
Tony DeAngelo also scored for New York.
“You can look at the goals, the nice plays, but I think it was the little things,” Strome said. “We worked hard for each other. It’s the things that the coaches have been preaching and we did it. It’ll be nice to do video next practice with some good clips instead of some bad ones.”
Chris Kreider scored late to make it 6-2 as the final score.
“I thought tonight right from the drop of the puck everybody was ready to go. We were all on our toes,” Howden said. “There was lots of energy on the bench, on the ice. Lots of communication. Everybody was really helping each other out. It felt like a really good team win.”
[WATCH:Â All Sabres vs. Rangers highlights]
Carter Hutton made 18 saves in the loss.
“The growth process doesn’t change depending on the score of a game. We are still making mistakes,” Krueger said. “We made mistakes in past games and we were able to find ways to win. Today, we just couldn’t recover from the hole that we dug ourselves into. This is not a big problem.”
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