If Game 3 appeared to tilt on last night’s single first-period shift on which Ryan Callahan hit the post on a gimme rebound from point-blank range before the Caps raced to the other end to extend their lead to 2-0 on Alexander Semin’s dandy backdoor goal at 11:36, it was only an optical illusion.
For as John Tortorella knows only too well, the Rangers never were really in their 2009 Broadway playoff debut, never really gave themselves the chance to extend their lead to 3-0 over the Caps, never played with the poise or intelligence they had displayed in taking the first two of the series in D.C.
“We stunk; it’s simple,” the head coach said after Simeon Varlamov blanked the Blueshirts 4-0 to bring the Caps within 2-1, with Game 4 set for tomorrow night at the Garden. “It was a good old-fashioned spanking where we need to take our medicine.”
It was medicine that tasted like acid going down the Rangers’ collective throats. While it’s true the Blueshirts did muster somewhat more of a down-low attack than they had in winning the opening two games of the series, their time of possession yielded nil.
Meanwhile, they broke down numerous times in their own end against the Caps’ skill players, notably Semin, who scored twice; Nicklas Backstrom, who might have been the most impressive player on the ice; Sergei Fedorov, who had a throwback game; and, of course, the unconquerable Alex Ovechkin, the hardest working man on the ice.
The Rangers watched the Caps play with the puck. They got caught on backdoor plays. They were outnumbered in critical parts of the ice. They didn’t take anybody. They didn’t keep the Caps to the perimeter.
“They made plays in this game, and we let them,” said Scott Gomez, who transported the puck well but could not create. “We probably watched them too much, and we can’t have that.”
Washington coach Bruce Boudreau may have saved the series by ditching Jose Theodore after the Game 1 debacle and switching to Varlamov, who has allowed one goal in two games and has blanked the Rangers for the last 112:16.
Boudreau made another important change last night when he moved Ovechkin onto the unit with Fedorov and Viktor Kozlov while shifting Tomas Fleischmann onto the line with Backstrom and Semin.
Backstrom and Semin assumed more responsibility without Ovechkin to carry them. Fedorov meanwhile elevated his game with the Big O on his wing. Semin scored two pretty ones at 6:57 and 11:36 of the first. Fedorov created the rebound on which Washington extended to 3-0 at 11:29 of the second against a noble but abandoned Henrik Lundqvist.
The Rangers not only did not step up in kind to match the Caps’ top guns, they fell back. They also face a decision for Game 4 concerning Chris Drury, who was completely ineffective playing one-handed hockey and two but two brief shifts in the third.
The power play, 0-for-6 in 8:16, is 0-for-11 in 18:16 over the last two games. The Dave Jackson-Kelly Sutherland referee pair made it its business to eliminate Sean Avery from the game by whistling him into oblivion. Mission accomplished.
But none of that was the crux of what was the matter with the Rangers as they were outclassed by the Southeast champs.
“We were terrible defensively,” said Tortorella. “To create offense you need to be sound defensively. We weren’t even close.”
But the series is . . . isn’t it?
