Wendell Cruz-Imagn Images
There may be no moral victories at this point of the season, but the New York Rangers have a lot of positives to take away from their 3-2 loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs on Friday night.
Coming out of the 4 Nations Face-Off break, the Rangers put a couple of lackluster performances on display where they were essentially dominated in terms of possession time and shots on net.
However, that actually wasn’t the case against the Maple Leafs.
From start to finish the Blueshirts were buzzing as they edged Toronto 35-17 in shots while generating multiple high-quality scoring chances throughout the entirety of the night.
The Rangers never held a lead over the course of the contest. New York climbed their way back twice with goals from Mika Zibanejad and Will Cuylle.
Matthew Knies’ third-period goal put the Maple Leafs up 3-2 and the Rangers couldn’t recover from there.
It was a couple of untimely mistakes that ultimately led to this loss.
“I thought we played really well,” Vincent Trocheck said. “Just a couple of mental lapses on our part that ended up killing us at the end. Overall, there are a lot of good things to take away.”
Peter Laviolette was happy with the way his team went out and competed. As he says after some losses, Laviolette strongly felt the Rangers did enough to win this game.
“Frustrating,” Laviolette said about his feelings. “It felt like it was on our stick for most of the night, it was in the offensive zone. I thought we defended really well… We were looking. We were hunting the entire night, just didn’t get rewarded for it.”
Regardless of the score, it seems like the Rangers’ game is heading in the right direction and the players took note of that.
“Sometimes you get the bounces, sometimes you don't,” Ryan Lindgren said. “We played a better game tonight than we did the past couple of games. It seems like we created a lot of chances, a lot of opportunities and they just didn’t go in for us.”
The playoff battle is continuing to heat up and the Rangers now find themselves four points out of a wild card spot, so this was certainly a costly game to drop.
The Rangers will be back in action on Sunday night against the Nashville Predators.