After New York Rangers coach Gerard Gallant described his team’s third-period performance last week against the San Jose Sharks as “embarrassing,” he was hardly thrilled with his team’s showing Sunday night in another loss, this one to the Columbus Blue Jackets.
Coming off the two disappointing outings, the Rangers host the Colorado Avalanche on Tuesday night.
The Rangers are 1-2-1 in their past four games, surviving a shaky third period on Oct. 17 in a 6-4 win over the Anaheim Ducks before slogging through Thursday’s 3-2 overtime loss to the Sharks. The third period against San Jose particularly irritated Gallant, as the Rangers were outshot 16-2 and promptly allowed the game-winner in the opening minute of overtime.
On Sunday, the follow up was a dud as the Rangers were badly outplayed in a 5-1 loss to Columbus.
“We were far from good enough,” Gallant said. “We were slow. I didn’t like the way we played. I like our team being an aggressive forechecking team. I didn’t see much of that. I thought were a step behind all night from a team that played back-to-back games, so I’m disappointed with that. The speed of our game wasn’t good.”
While the Rangers conceded 21 shots on goal, they did little offensively as Artemi Panarin scored the lone goal to give him a league-best 12 points.
“We’ve got a lot of games to play here,” New York defenseman Jacob Trouba said. “I don’t think there’s a panic level in here.”
Colorado heads to New York off to the same 3-2-1 start as the Rangers, but the Avalanche are still missing captain Gabriel Landeskog, who is recovering from knee surgery.
Even without Landeskog, the Avalanche are the league’s fourth-best scoring team (22 goals in six games), thanks to a hot start from Valeri Nichushkin. Nichushkin has 6 goals and 11 points and has collected at least one point in each game.
On Saturday, Nichushkin scored 8:10 into the third period of a 3-2 win over the host Vegas Golden Knights after the Avalanche went eight minutes without a shot on goal. Nathan MacKinnon and Evan Rodrigues also scored on the power play, giving Colorado the league’s top power play at 52.9 percent (9 for 17) after converting 24.0 percent of man advantages last season.
The Avalanche enter a three-game trip through the New York area after playing three games in four nights. They lost one-goal decisions to Winnipeg and Seattle.
“Obviously we don’t get to pick the schedule,” defenseman Cale Makar said. “But yeah, it’s been crazy. We’ve had two back-to-backs already, where we’re getting in late and playing with a rested team the next day, so it is what it is. For us, it’s a good challenge, and that’s kind of the way that we look at it.”
Tuesday also marks goalie Alexandar Georgiev’s return to New York. Georgiev came up as Henrik Lundqvist’s backup during the 2017-18 season and started 117 games for the Rangers before his rights were traded to Colorado, which re-signed him to a three-year deal.
Georgiev is 3-0-1 with a 2.76 goals-against average in four games for his new team and made 33 saves Saturday.
Colorado is 6-1-1 in the past eight meetings with the Rangers and scored 11 goals in sweeping the season series last year.
–Field Level Media
