WASHINGTON — It was like the first two-plus weeks of the season happened in some semi-conscious state, and all of a sudden, the alarm has gone off and the Rangers have woken up to a cold, cold morning.
The reality, for good and bad, is that these Blueshirts have a lot of room to grow before they start to see the other side of this rebuild. If optimism for this season has diminished slightly after a third straight loss came with a 5-2 defeat to the Capitals here on Friday night, then that’s only because it might have been too high to begin with.
“We just weren’t mentally sharp at all. We lost our way,” coach David Quinn said after his team couldn’t maintain much offensive zone time and was desultory in their own end. “There was a lot of purposeless hockey tonight.”
Games like this are bound to happen for the young Rangers (2-3-0), whose lows like this against the experienced Capitals (5-2-2) might come more often than they like, but does not necessarily taint the possibilities for the future. The Blueshirts have had such a strange start to their schedule, just three games in the first 13 days before this jarring back-to-back that started with a 5-2 loss to the Devils in Newark on Thursday, that just playing games and getting live-action feedback seems valuable.
“I’m sure that’s a little piece of it,” Quinn said. “But you have to learn to play tired. That’s part of being a pro. When you don’t have it, just be structurally sound and don’t run around thinking you’re going to force it. We were forcing things all over the rink.”
The sloppiness led Quinn to juggling his lines, once before the game and once in-game, as well as benching defenseman Tony DeAngelo for all but two shifts after the first period. Goalie Henrik Lundqvist was inundated with high-danger scoring chances, stopping 30 of 34 shots in his third start of the season — that while his team lost the special-teams battle again, going 1-for-4 on their power play while the Capitals went 2-for-4.
“When you face some of the best power plays, like we did today, they had so many different options,” said Lundqvist, who kept his team in it with a couple big stops that included one on a penalty shot on Jakub Vrana at 10:16 of the second period.
That middle frame was when the Blueshirts came out lifeless, not getting a shot on Lundqvist’s counterpart, Braden Holtby, until there was 8:57 left in the frame.
“It felt like pretty much every shift was an odd-man rush,” Lundqvist said of the second period. “They’re a really good team when you give them that type of game. They have some skill players; they want rush chances. You don’t want to get into that type of game. We did. But we kind of got out of the period.”
That would come by way of Artemi Panarin finishing a nice give-and-go with his new right-winger, Chris Kreider, cutting the deficit to 3-2 at 16:56 of the second. But T.J. Oshie managed his second power-play goal of game at 10:18 of the third, making it 4-2 on a deft tip of the shot from red-hot defenseman John Carlson, who collected three more assists to give him a league-leading 14.
Washington was given that power play because of an extra minor called on Brendan Smith from a cross-check preceding his fight with Garnet Hathaway — just another inconsistency during another game that was haphazardly officiated. But the Rangers’ previously struggling man advantage could get only one, from Pavel Buchnevich at 12:25 of the first period that tied it at 1. That was a distant memory by the time Hathaway ended it into the empty net with just 28 seconds left.
“It sucks losing. I hate losing,” said Mika Zibanejad. “But there is always a lesson. Hopefully we can learn from it quickly, and move on.”