This was oh so close to one more 3-2 disaster for the New York Rangers. Another blown 2-1 lead lead to the Rangers and Sabres going to extra time in Buffalo on Thursday night.
The Rangers were rescued by Alexis Lafreniere who took a nifty feed from Colin Blackwell across the high slot and wristed hoe the winner at 2:47 of the extra session for a 3-2 win.
“It’s pretty crazy. Overtime, game-winning goal, it was really special. I’ll never forget this moment, for sure,” Lafreniere said. “I had a lot of good chances and I was just keeping it going. It was going to go in, for sure. I kept going, kept grinding. Nice pass by [Colin Blackwell] and I had the open net. It was a really good play by ‘Blacky.'”
The Rangers had been a woeful 0-3-1 in their previous four games.
“We needed this. We needed this because we had done a lot of good things,” Rangers head coach David Quinn said. “I look at the standings and I see our point total regarding the rest of the League and I’m shaking my head. I know what we’re capable of doing. These players know what we’re capable of doing.
“It was frustrating because we thought we played some good hockey over the last four games on this trip. We come out of this trip with three points, we felt we played better, we felt we maybe deserved a few more points, but that being said, the way we responded under these circumstances says an awful lot about this group. There’s a lot of things you learn about your team as a season moves forward, and we learned an awful lot about our team over the last 24 hours.”
Igor Shesterkin made 23 saves for his first win of the season.
“Obviously everybody talks about his world-class talent, but this guy is a [gutsy] kid. He really is,” Quinn said. “I don’t care if he’s the first pick or the 271st pick, he’s a [gutsy] kid. … He probably should have had four goals tonight, but for him to get his first goal in that moment, in that situation under those circumstances, I couldn’t be happier for him. His game is coming. He’s playing better and better each night. It’s just great to see, it really is.”
Sam Reinhart and Jack Eichel were the Sabres strikers.
“A compliment to the Rangers,” Sabres head coach Ralph Krueger said. “They truly came out like a caged animal, coming out to fight their way back into the standings. You could feel that right off the hop. We didn’t match it, which was disappointing, but I thought more than anything we managed the puck really, really badly. We were too complicated. We were too slow with our puck decisions.”
Artemi Panarin had a goal and two points on the night, Ryan Strome opened the scoring, giving the Rangers an early 1-0 lead.
Linus Ullmark made 36 saves in the loss.
“Linus got us the point, there’s no way to dance around that one,” Reinhart said. “A little too slow watching them skate around us, get to pucks first. It’s not a recipe for success.”
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