PHILADELPHIA — David Quinn did not shy away from playing up Monday’s game against the Flyers.
It was Game 36 of 82, but with the Rangers on the second night of a back-to-back before the Christmas break and facing the team directly in front of them in the Metropolitan Division standings, Quinn bought into the meaning of it.
“We can’t hide from how big this game is,” the coach said Sunday.
It turned out to be equally big for a certain ex-Ranger.
Kevin Hayes beat Henrik Lundqvist for what proved to be game-winner in the third period and later added a second goal to lift the Flyers past the Rangers 5-1 at Wells Fargo Center.
Travis Sanheim also scored a pair of goals as Alain Vigneault’s Flyers (21-11-5) scored five unanswered goals, including three in the final five minutes, to put the Rangers’ solid effort for most of the night to waste.
“It should hurt,” Quinn said. “There’s a difference between playing well and winning. Right now, we’ve got to do a better job of playing winning hockey.”
Hayes, who the Rangers (17-15-4) dealt to the Jets at last season’s trade deadline before he signed a seven-year, $50 million contract with the Flyers this summer, was playing his former teammates for the first time in the regular season. He delivered the dagger with a wrister on the rush and broke the 1-1 tie at 7:31 of the third period as his new fans erupted.
Kevin HayesNHLI via Getty Images“He’s been wound up about this game for a while,” said Vigneault, who was also coaching his first regular-season game against the team that fired him in 2018. “Maybe he just told you it was just another game, but I know that meant a lot to him. He’s a very emotional young man and scored two really big goals for us tonight.”
Flyers goalie Carter Hart (33 saves) out-dueled Lundqvist (25 saves), who had bailed the Rangers out a few times early on while playing both ends of the back-to-back. Hart also got some help from the post in the third period as Mika Zibanejad struck the pipe with a shot that could have tied the game at two.
Instead, less than three minutes later, Sanheim finished off a juicy rebound into a wide-open net to make it 3-1 and open up the floodgates.
“It’s been a trend lately — when we feel we have to score a goal when we fall behind, we start taking chances a little too much, in my opinion,” Lundqvist said. “[The Flyers] pretty much did whatever they wanted the last five minutes there in front. So it was disappointing.”
Sanheim also scored with 1.7 seconds left in the second period to tie the game at one after Jesper Fast had put the Rangers up 1-0 earlier in the period with a shorthanded tally.
The Rangers went 0-for-4 on the power play and let 1:04 of a five-on-three go to waste in the first period. Those missed opportunities loomed large in the third period once the Rangers went behind.
“It’s 1-1 and I think we’ve got great chances, good zone time and we just made it too easy for them,” Quinn said. “We sell out for offense too much. It’s killing us.”
In the end, it was Hayes and the Rangers’ old system that proved to be their undoing.
“That team feeds off turnovers and the counterattack. They’re so good on the rush,” Chris Kreider said. “That’s how we used to play with [Vigneault] — our structure was tight and eventually teams would get strung out, stretched out and you’d get your rushes and looks. We hurt ourselves there in the third for sure.”
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