PITTSBURGH – Who knows, maybe the point the Rangers gained with what strength remained in their fingernails through the final 13 regulation minutes they played without Jaromir Jagr yesterday will turn out to be the one that gets them into playoffs.
That was of no immediate consolation, not after Jagr couldn’t answer the third-period bell with leg numbness he first felt Thursday night in Uniondale, nor after a 2-0 third-period lead melted into an overtime and, ultimately, a pointless loss of a valuable point.
When Michal Rozsival twice failed to the clear the puck early in the extra session, and Marek Malik stupidly deflected Colby Armstrong’s wide-angle game-winner over Henrik Lundqvist’s shoulder, the Penguins, who had played the first two periods from Kansas City, pulled out a 3-2 victory that left Lundqvist seething.
“First, we took [10] penalties, way too many,” the goalie said. “Second of all, we can’t clear the zone twice.
“We got so tired after killing all those penalties and [in overtime] we couldn’t get off. It’s tough to lose after we played so well.”
They played only well enough to carve out a working margin, not hard enough, after two exhausting wins against the Islanders this week, to bury a dozing but dangerous opponent that had accumulated but nine shots halfway through the game.
Karel Rachunek, determinedly keeping the puck in at the point, jumped into the slot to convert a Michael Nylander feed and Matt Cullen put a wrister under Marc-Andre Fleury’s glove. But five Rangers power-play opportunities having been spent passing the puck around the perimeter and with their best player unable to continue, the hard week began to take a toll.
The penalty Rozsival took for high-sticking Armstrong just after Fleury may have saved the game with a dead-on stop of Brad Isbister, was a tired, bad-positioning kind of penalty that subsequently enabled Evgeni Malkin to line up Rachunek into a partial screen and beat Lundqvist to the short side.
“I saw it late,” said Lundqvist, who then saw Brandon Dubinsky hook Sidney Crosby, and normally tough-as-nails Sean Avery make a soft play along the boards.
Ryan Whitney was the better man at the point, enabling Crosby to glove down Malkin’s thigh-high cross-crease pass and backhand in the tying goal.
Avery made the Rangers kill one more penalty after that, but they managed it, and even got a break when both Crosby and Malkin went off for equipment repairs before the overtime and couldn’t get back for the first shift. The two wunderkinds had their noses against the other side of the glass when Maxime Talbot stripped Rozsival and fed Armstrong near the bottom of the circle. Lundqvist had every angle to his advantage until Malik put his stick out 3:41 before the Rangers could get this to a shootout.
“What do you think?” said Lundqvist, asked if he would have preferred Malik let the goalie do his job.
Lundqvist had robbed Ryan Whitney on a 2-on-1, and stopped Sergei Gonchar on a breakaway in the final minutes of the second period while Malik was up ice taking a slashing penalty. But the Penguins were starting to come alive as the Rangers’ best player’s right leg was going dead.
“It was getting worse and worse,” Jagr said before adding he hoped to play this afternoon at the Garden against Carolina, currently the team the Rangers have to catch in the Eastern Conference.
Only theoretically are those two points more important than yesterday’s. Not when the Rangers had both of those in their hands.
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Brendan Shanahan, out 10 games with a concussion suffered in a collision with the Flyers’ Mike Knuble, yesterday was cleared to being light bike riding.
“We don’t know at what pace a player recovers from this kind of thing,” Tom Renney said. “Whether he inches his way along or improves by leaps and bounds, we have no control of that.”