They had a five-minute major to kill just 6:16 into Saturday night’s match in Pittsburgh, did the Rangers, and so that’s just what the Rangers did.
They did it magnificently, surrendering just four benign shots in erasing the power play the Penguins had erroneously been awarded for a Tomas Kloucek hit on Toby Petersen, and they did it by employing 10 sets of forwards and eight pairs of defensemen over the course of the five minutes.
“Teddy Green has been running the penalty killing, and one of the things he’s been emphasizing is to get on and off quickly,” Walt Kyle, who ran the bench with Green in Ron Low’s absence, said following the Rangers’ 1-0 OT defeat. “We want quick changes, we want fresh players on the ice giving us good pressure.
“That’s what we were able to do in this game, and that’s been a major reason for our improvement on the penalty killing.”
Improvement? Quantum leap is more like it. For after languishing at the bottom of the league in penalty killing through the early weeks of the season, the Rangers went into last night’s Garden match against the Thrashers with 23 straight kills dating back to the first period of the Nov. 8 Islander game, when they surrendered a five-on-three. They’ve gone five straight games without allowing a five-on-four after allowing at least one PPGA in eight of the previous nine matches, and in 13 of the first 16.
“We have made a few changes,” Andreas Johansson, who skates on a penalty-killing pair up front with well-rounded neophyte Mikael Samuelsson, said. “At the start of the year we were allowing teams to skate out of their own end and into ours without much pressure. Now we’re pressuring the puck at their end.
“And then, before, we were guilty of being too passive and allowing the power play to set up in our end, which we’ve changed. The other mistake we made was being too concerned about shots from areas of the ice we shouldn’t have worried about. We would chase the puck in bad ice and leave the good ice uncovered.
“Now we don’t worry about shots that we know Mike [Richter] or Danny [Blackburn] will be able to handle. Those have all been parts of the improvement.”
The improvement – “Could it have gotten worse? No, it couldn’t,” Johansson asked and answered – sent the Rangers into last night’s game all the way up to 28th in the league in penalty-killing efficiency at 79.4 percent.
“With our personnel and talent, there was never any reason for our record to be as bad as it was; it was embarrassing the way we were giving up so many power-play goals,” said Theo Fleury, who has been reunited with Mike York to form a standard penalty-killing pair. “There’s no reason – especially with our goaltending – we shouldn’t be one of the better teams in the league in that area.”
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Manny Malhotra, who apparently suffered a slightly sprained ankle late in Saturday’s second period and thereafter received one shift in the third, was spry of step as he walked into the locker room last night.
Richter, 5-0 with a 1.99 GAA and .933 save percentage in November, and 7-1 with a 1.98 GAA and .942 save percentage in his previous eight starts, was in net last night.
Thrashers humiliated the Rangers twice last year at the Garden, 4-1 and 7-2 on Dec. 28 and Jan. 29, respectively, victories that book-ended an Atlanta 14-game winless streak.
