It’s a 3-game series after 4-1 Tampa win

It’s a three game series now with the New York Rangers and Tampa Bay Lightning tied at two games apiece. The good news is the Rangers have home ice advantage and are riding a seven game home winning streak.  The bad news is the Blueshirts are getting hurt by injuries and the Lightning are hitting their stride.

The Rangers played with center Ryan Strome and lost Filip Chytil in the second period to an upper body injury.  Barclay Goodrow was clearly below par and Ryan Lindgren continues to battle his lower body injury. The playoffs are a war of attrition and the Rangers are suffering their share of injuries.

Once the Lightning took a 1-0 lead just 2:38 into the game, it was an uphill battle for the New Yorkers and they could only break up the shutout with a power play goal and Shesterkin pulled with 3:33 left in the game.

The goal by Artemi Panarin  pulled them within two goals, but they couldn’t do much in the remaining time and Ondrej Palat sealed the win with an empty net goal.

Tampa has to get a lot of credit for the way that they played.  Their transition game was crisp, Andrei Vasilevskiy was excellent when he needed to be and the Lightning defense absolutely stifled the Rangers’ top lines.

The Rangers outshot the Lightning 35-31 but that’s a misleading statistic as Tampa had a big advantage when it came to scoring chances (34-26) and high danger chances (15-9).

Gerard Gallant said he was disappointed with his team. “They’d better be ready to play harder. Now it’s a two out of three and we’ve still got the home ice, but we’ve got to be ready to play better.”  He explained, “We didn’t block enough shots, we didn’t finish enough hits, the good things that make you win games, that’s what we gotta do better…Vasilevskiy made some good saves but he didn’t have to make enough good saves. Not near as many as Shesty had to make…we had five or six quality chances, we have to get a lot more than that. ”

The players were not quite as critical.  Jacob Trouba said “We’re playing, we’re creating some good chances. They scored some good goals. We didn’t capitalize on ours. I don’t think we expected to walk in and blow the doors off the thing.  This is competitive hockey.  This is a really good team we’re playing and this is going to be hard games…it’s the best of three in the Eastern Conference Finals and it’s something to be excited about as a group.  We’re in a pretty good spot here.  We’re going to go home and do what we can to win a game.”

Trouba had the last word, saying “You expect their best (the Lightning), you want their best and we want to show that we can beat the best.  We feel we’re an up and coming team and we’ve arrived and we want to play these games.”

Back home

As for the Rangers, they are looking ahead to returning to the friendly confines of Madison Square Garden.  Gallant said “I’m hoping it’s gonna be a homer series. That’s what it looks like so far.  We were pretty good in our building, they’re pretty good in their building. That’s what I see so far.”

He has good reason to be optimistic. The Rangers have won eight in a row at the Garden with their only loss in triple overtime. They’ve outscored the opposition 38-20 and their power play is at 31% efficiency.

With the last change, Gallant will be able to get the Zibanejad line away from the Cirelli line that shut down the Blueshirts’ top line in Tampa. He tried mixing up his lines due to injuries and in an effort jump start the offense.  For the latter half of the game, he had Mika Zibanejad and Frank Vatrano playing with Artemi Panarin while Chris Kreider moved to play with Barclay Goodrow and Andrew Copp.   Still, the Rangers did not score an even strength goal in the two games in Tampa.

It remains to be seen if Ryan Strome will be able to play on Thursday and how severe the injury is to Chytil.  The Kid Line was impressive, dominating possession in their shifts before the Chytil injury.

Igor Shesterkin was good but not great while Vasilevskiy is rounding into top playoff form after a couple off games.

The Rangers will need Shesterkin to be at the top of his game for the Rangers even strength offense to click if they want to go back to Tampa with a 3-2 lead.

Here is a video recap of the game.