Rangers3 Red Wings2
DETROIT – If hockey is a team game, Mike Richter was pretty much the Ranger team here last night against the Red Wings.
It was a game in which the Blueshirts played rope-a-dope to the maximum while controlling thepuck in the offensive zone to a minimum A game where they were outshot by 40-14. A game in which Wayne Gretzky had to bow to the reality of a painful rib pull and sit out the final 14 minutes.
A game that the Rangers won, 3-2.
“We had played two good games [in Washington and Carolina] and tonight we just held on; it’s pretty obvious to everyone that Mike won the game tonight,” Brian Leetch said. “The Red Wings kept coming all night long.
“It was Mike’s win tonight.”
Just as obviously, though, it was a Ranger win, one they managed when Niklas Sundstrom trolled for a loose puck in front of the Detroit net and whipped it high over Chris Osgood’s shoulder with just 4:42 remaining in the third period.
It was a win that gave the team a 2-1 road trip and pushed it to within three points of the eighth-place Panthers, who have one game in hand. Despitehaving gone 4-7 in their last 11 and 6-7 for the month, the Rangers are now closer to a playoff spot than they’ve been since Dec. 30, when they trailed the-then eighth-place Senators by three points.
Gretzky went into the game with tenderness in the rib cage following his first-period collision with Marek Malik in Thursday’s overtime loss to Carolina. It was obvious throughout that the injury was hampering his play, so rarely did 99 even have the puck on his stick. Finally, six minutes into the third after failing to gather a Leetch feed within inches of him, Gretzky and John Muckler reached the mutual conclusion that it was time for him to sit.
“It was probably the best decision for the team. It had gotten to the point that I couldn’t do anything,” said Gretzky, who will rest and rehab today and intends to try to play in tomorrow night’s Garden match against the Caps. “They were going to match [Steve] Yzerman or [Sergei] Fedorov against me. It’s hard enough at full strength against those two guys.”
With Gretzky sidelined, Muckler inserted Manny Malhotra between Adam Graves and John MacLean for the line’s final six shifts, even using the freshman on a shift with 1:20 to go. Malhotra did fine.
“Manny’s young, but he’s very smart defensively,” Gretzky said.
Actually, despite the shot total, the Rangers were reasonably smart defensively, playing it inside-out, forcing the fast and skilled Red Wings to try and gain the zone and an alley to the net from the outside. The Red Wings did, all night, but a large number of Detroit’s shots were from the perimeter, and few came on rebounds.
Still, at the end of the first period the shots were 13-5, nine minutes into the second they were 23-7, and with nine minutes to play they were 34-11.
The shots were 34-11 but the match was tied 2-2, Detroit having gotten goals from Igor Larionov and Brendan Shanahan while Petr Nedved and John MacLean had scored for the Rangers.
“We played about 50 minutes in our end but when you’re outshot like that and still in the game, anything can happen,” said Schneider.
What happened was that Richter would not let the Rangers lose. In Washington on Tuesday, Richter withstood a 16-3 shot barrage in the second period to send his team into the third even 1-1 before the Rangers emerged with a 4-1 win. He was terrific in Carolina. And then again, last night.
“You have to get to the point where you learn to win as a group,” said Richter. “You have to learn to depend on one another, to feel a sense of confidence that the guy next to you in the room is going to get it done.
“You have to develop confidence as a team.”
A team that last night should have had the letters, R-I-C-H-T-E-R, across the front of its uniform sweaters.
