Rangers beat Bruins 5-4 for a wild finish to a crazy season

Just when it looked like the New York Rangers would end the season with  a six game losing streak, a depleted Blueshirts squad came up with four third period goals to beat the Bruins, a team with a lot at stake.  The win came from the past and the future as stalwarts Mika Zibanejad, Pavel Buchnevich and Ryan Strome had a hand in four of the goals and youngsters K’Andre Miller, Vitali Kravtsov and Alexis Lafrenière scored key goals.

In winning the Rangers avoided losing six games in a row for the first time since February 18 and they dealt the Bruins a crushing blow in their quest to finish first or second in the East Division.  With the loss, they can’t finish first, are close to be being locked out of second place and blew an opportunity to clinch at least third place.

It wasn’t a work of art for the Blueshirts as they were outworked and outchanced throughout the game.  It could be seen as a miracle that they were tied 1-1 after two periods as the Bruins outshot the Rangers 27-12 and they had a mindblowing 53 shot attempts compared to only 14 for the Rangers at even strength.  Including power plays, their shot attempt advantage over two periods was 59-18.

The third period was a different story as the shot attempt disparity was only 19-16 in favor of the Bruins.  Shots on goal were even at 11 each and the most important statistic was goals with the Rangers scoring four times to the B’s three.  The final goal came from the Bruins after they had pulled Tukka Rask in favor of an extra skater.  Patrice Bergeron scored with 1:21 left to make it interesting.

The first goal was the epitome of the Rangers’ season.   First, Filip Chytil cleanly won a faceoff, an unusual event on its own.  The, Justin Richards, making his NHL debut, got to the puck and sent to K’Andre Miller who sent a seeing eye shot past Rask.

Of course, the heroics came from an unexpected source as Keith Kinkaid got the starting assignment and was lights out.

Unfortunately, Kinkaid sustained a lower body injury while making a save and had to be replaced by Igor Shesterkin who allowed the two late goals by Boston.   Because the Rangers scored the winning goal while Shesterkin was in net, he gets the win over Kinkaid.

David Quinn reflected on the final game and sounded like he expected to be back. “I thought  our guys did a helluva job today.  The showed a lot of characteristics we’re gonna need moving forward.  The game against the Caps spoke a lot about the players that we have here…These are things we can carry over through the summer and into next fall.”

He also spoke about how tough this season has been and the fact that they were in contention late.  “It’s been a long year for everybody, it’s been a unique year for everybody in this league…we were in this thing 10 days ago.  We had a chance…every team goes through injuries and we got hit hard the last two weeks of the season.  We weren’t able to fight out way through it. Then again, it feels like ten years ago we were heading into that two game series with the Islanders. We had a chance to make the playoffs, to make the push and unfortunately we weren’t able to do it.”

A drained Mika Zibanejad also spoke to the press and was reluctant to reflect on the season, was just gratified by the win.  Zibanejad scored the 200th goal of his career and also hit 50 points on the season.

Here is a full video recap of the game.