Rangers 3
Sabres 1
BUFFALO – There are no additional bonus points awarded for style in this man’s NHL. A win, no matter ugly, is a win, worth two points in the standings. So the Rangers were happy to pack last night’s 3-1 victory over the Sabres with them as they crossed the border for tonight’s match in Toronto.
But if the Blueshirts, or their coaching staff, believe a similar lowest-common-denominator performance will suffice against the Maple Leafs, they are mistaken. And if the intent is to allot ice time and use combinations that were barely efficient enough to produce last night’s win against an inferior opponent, this would be a blunder of a somewhat sizeable proportion.
Somehow, Bobby Holik, easily the team’s best player the past seven weeks, found himself on a fourth line between Matt Barnaby and 29-year-old Jason MacDonald, a recall from Hartford playing his first NHL match in his 10th pro season. Somehow Holik was sent out most of the game against Buffalo’s fourth line. This was a combination Glen Sather formed after moving Eric Lindros between Holik’s erstwhile wingers, Martin Rucinsky and Alex Kovalev, and shifting Jed Ortmeyer to the right side on a unit with Mark Messier and Chris Simon.
Lindros, who has bounced all over the lineup, had a big-time game (other than annexing the two points, that was by far the best part of the night for the Rangers) as Sather rolled four lines in anticipation of tonight’s match, the third in four days for his team. But with the following one not until Thursday (at home against the Islanders) there’s no call for such an egalitarian approach against a Toronto team that swept the Rangers in a nasty home-and-home two weeks ago.
Perhaps Sather has no intention of going with four lines tonight. Perhaps he’ll even try to get his most dominant players on the ice as much as possible.
“We shouldn’t be fooled into thinking this was anything more than a win against a team that’s struggling,” said Holik, who got 14:49 of ice. “We are going to have to be much, much better in order to beat the Maple Leafs.”
If Sather rearranged the furniture up front, he also redecorated the back line, reuniting Tom Poti with Brian Leetch and pairing Darius Kasparaitis with Greg de Vries, leaving the Boris Mironov-Vladimir Malakhov pair intact. But Mironov may not be available tonight after receiving an intent-to-injure match penalty for his stick to the head of Adam Mair with 2:41 to play. Mironov, whose match penalty will automatically be reviewed for supplementary discipline by the NHL, retaliated after Mair missed with a high stick to Mironov’s head.
“Clean, open-ice hits are fine, but cheap shots like [Mair] was giving and trying to give are going to cost him,” Mironov said. “He missed my head by an inch; if not, I’d be injured. If he’s going to play that way, so are we.”
The Rangers had a significant advantage against the depressed Sabres, losers of four straight in a minor-league environment. But the game was 1-1 late in the second before Holik’s work in front on the power play allowed Anson Carter to sweep home a rebound at 19:50.
Kovalev had scored from in front on a brilliant Lindros backhand feed in the first, and Petr Nedved ended an eight-game drought in getting the clincher midway through the third.
“We’ll take this one into Toronto,” Lindros said. “It’s something to build on.”
They’d better build on it.