The New York Rangers blew another third period lead, the fourth time this season, but they went to a shootout for the first time and won in seven rounds. It was a thrilling game for fans, but it was the kind of game that gives coaches ulcers. The Blueshirts came away with another two points and the only negatives were that gifted a Metropolitan Division rival a point and they might have lost Sammy Blais for a while with a knee injury. We’ll get to the Blais injury in a moment.
The most important developments for the Rangers were that they got goals from Kaapo Kakko and Alexis Lafrenière, both who had been slumping and they got a solid performance in goal from Alexandar Georgiev, especially in the shootout. They also won without getting scoring from Artemi Panarin or Mika Zibanejad and that has to be a positive.
Gallant was very complimentary about the play of his young players, especially Kaapo Kakko saying “The kid played great tonight, he looked like a beast and I’m happy for him.”
With the fact that Lafrenière also scored, Gallant said “Those kids are young kids, you just have to keep playing them…they’re gonna be good players for us and if they can do what they did tonight it will really help our team.”
The Blais injury
The Blais injury will be getting a lot of attention for the next few days as it appeared to have been caused by P.K. Subban. At 3:53 of the third period, the two players were going into the boards and Subban used his right foot to drive Blais’ leg awkwardly into the boards. When Blais went down, he twisted his leg and had to leave the ice without putting any weight on it.
Subban has already had three incidents this season involving slewfoots including one in the preseason with Ryan Reaves. In October he was fined $5,000 for tripping Milan Lucic of Calgary and on November 2 he tripped Trevor Zegras of Anaheim and was fined $15,000. Subban wasn’t penalized on the play, but you could see Gallant saying “four times” to the referee after the play. Hopefully the league will look at it.
When asked about it, all Gallant would say was “It’s a lot like the Reaves one that I saw.”
The game was too close for the Rangers to retaliate and risk penalties and now it will have to wait until March as the teams don’t meet again for the next four months.