It was clear thinking from the veteran mind of Martin St. Louis, the Rangers alternate captain stating an obvious but often overlooked point.
"We're trying to bring our best every game," St. Louis said Monday morning, "but it's a hard thing to do for 82 games."
That was just hours before the Rangers played a game riddled with mistakes — and yet found a way to play an electric third period and outduel the Panthers for a 6-3 victory at the Garden.
"I always go back to," St. Louis said, "it's about finding ways [to win]."
So it wasn't the prettiest performance, but the Rangers' three goals in a span of 11 minutes in the final period allowed them to take home their second straight win.
With 8:10 gone by in the third and the game tied 3-3, the Rangers got a big play from Dan Boyle, of all people. The struggling defenseman got an attempted pass to hit the stick of Panthers captain Willie Mitchell and beat goalie Roberto Luongo under his right arm, giving the Blueshirts a 4-3 lead. It was supplemented by Mats Zuccarello roofing a rebound with 4:02 remaining, and then Rick Nash rolling in his second of the night — his 31st of the season — into the empty net with 1:53 left.
It seems the Rangers (29-15-4) are struggling to regain the form they had before the All-Star break, when they won 16-of-19 by playing smart and fast hockey. They came out of the break losing two in a row while scoring just one garbage-time goal, and then managed a 4-1 win over the Hurricanes on Saturday in another game in which they had large swaths of sloppy hockey.
That had forced coach Alain Vigneault to do something he doesn't like, which is a wholesale changing of his forward lines.
"In our last game, at some point we were not only getting outshot, we were getting out-chanced almost 3-1," Vigneault said before the game, during which he flip-flopped Kevin Hayes and Derick Brassard midway through the second period, putting Brassard with Chris Kreider and Zuccarello and Hayes between Carl Hagelin and Jesper Fast.
"I'm not crazy about line juggling. A lot of times I'll give the benefit to a player. I'll tell him, 'I'm giving you one or two more shifts here, I better see something.' So I think that showing confidence and continuity usually pays off.
"But some nights, you just have to put everything in the blender and see what comes out."
The Panthers (21-17-10) came into the game reeling a bit, losing to the Devil, 3-1 on Saturday night in Newark. But they managed to tie this game in a second-period flurry, when David Bolland batted one in off the crossbar at 12:51 and three minutes later, Bolland found Brandon Pirri, who scored on a power-play one-timer after a bad Dan Girardi tripping penalty, his second of the game.
"You play 82 games, you're going to see cold streaks, hot streaks," defenseman Dan Boyle said. "You're going to see it all. You just have to try to minimize when you're not playing as well and not scoring, and you have to try to maximize, as we did the last couple months, when things are going well."
The Blueshirts had taken a 3-1 lead just before that, with Hayes scoring a power-play goal at 2:51 of the second, followed six minutes later with a Marc Staal wrist shot that deflected off Sean Bergenheim and past Luongo.
Those goals only temporarily allowed the Rangers to forget their awful start. With just four minutes gone by, Ryan McDonagh handed the puck to Brad Boyes, who eventually found Aleksander Barkov for a quick wrister to give the Panthers a 1-0 lead.
Three minutes later, Girardi took his first tripping penalty and gave Florida a power play. But that's when Nash asserted himself, stealing the puck from 18-year-old rookie Aaron Ekblad and racing down for a breakaway, which he cooly converted with a smooth fake to his forehand, tucking it past Luongo to take a 1-1 tie into the second.
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