Senators - 2 Rangers - 1
I'll keep this short.
The team looked gassed tonight. That has been a problem in the back end of back to backs for the Rangers so far under Tortorella and the lack of conditioning is a legit area of concern going forward for this team. It didn't help that only three forwards showed up tonight. Ottawa did a great job in their own zone pressuring the puck carrier and blocking shots, Chris Phillips in particular had a monster game. One again as is the case when ever we seem to play him, Alex Auld turns into a wall when the Rangers play him. I've said that when ever the Rangers play him they get W'Auld, cuz the dude turns into a fucking wall. Despite his performance, the Rangers came oh so close to tying up the game with less than a minute left when Gomez passed the puck from behind the net right onto the tape of Antropovs stick, but his shot hit the skate of Phillips. I actually jumped out of my chair thinking the puck was in when this happened but it was just one of those games.
Three up, three down
Up: Ryan Callahan: Set up the loan goal with his hussle. Was visibile when ever he was out there, threw a bunch of good hits and came within a fraction of an inch of netting his 20th of the year and rining it off the pipe instead.
Brandon Dubinsky - Finally ended his goal scoring dought. He and Callahan were excellent tonight. I thought Tortorella should have kept those two together and thrown Antropov with them in the third.
Nik Antropov - Could have easily had 2 goals tonight if it wasn't for being W'Auld on a breakaway and stopped by Phillips skate. Did great work in the fore check and made one of those plays that makes your jaw drop when he basically tossed a defender in the corner and made a perfect pass to drury for a scoring chance.
Three Down
Avery/Gomez/Zherdev - This line sucked tonight. They're going to run into problems if they try to do things by themselves instead of using eachother. Zherdev really pissed me off at times tonight trying to get too cute with the puck and ofcourse the eventual game winner was caused by Gomez trying to get too cute instead of just getting the puck in deep.
Markus Naslund - His hands are gone. He had 3 golden oppurtunites but couldn't bury any of them. I guess you can say he doesn't belong here since he wasn't as bad as the three above him but still, you have to bury atleast one of the chances he had tonight.
Wade Redden - Through out the game he was pretty good but the 2nd Senators goal was on him after Gomez and Avery fucked up. He let the shooter play him instead of standing him up and screened hank in the process. It was still a shot that Lundqvist usually stops but not a soft goal by any means.
Michael Rozsival will undergo an MRI tomorrow to see if he fucked up his knee worse than it looked like he did. Expect Potter to get the call up for Tuesday, though Sauer deserves it more and I'd love to see what Sanguinetti could do in a game or two with the Rangers.
Next up: Tuesday at home against Minnesota. Funny how Gaborik just happens to get healthy in time for the Rangers (and wasn't well enough to play the Devils last week, though it probably wouldn't have made a difference in that game) Minnesota is a Renney type of team so we should be able to take it to them if we play our A game. I'm going to laugh if Dan Fritche ends up scoring a hat trick in this game - he was misused worse than Prucha when he was here.
