In a game that was all about the goaltenders, here was Rangers coach Alain Vigneault laying something out very clearly, without hesitation, and with very little prompting.
His team had just lost the Devils, 3-2, on Tuesday night at the Garden, and in what was a close and hard-fought game, the one soft moment Vigneault pointed to was when Henrik Lundqvist let a Ryan Carter backhand slip through his legs, giving the Devils a 2-1 lead with just 47.1 seconds left in the second period.
“I’m not quite sure what happened,” Vigneault said when asked directly about Carl Hagelin losing a race to the puck — losing a race to Ryan Carter? — which resulted in the goal. “It’s a routine first-man-on-the-puck. Mind you, it’s a routine save. So…”
Vigneault’s postgame press conference was over, and he might as well have dropped the microphone.
Whether he wanted to or not, the impression he left was that of a turning-point moment, a moment when his franchise goaltender let the team down. Which is almost unheard of in normal circumstances, and even more so when Lundqvist is facing Martin Brodeur, the to-be Hall of Famer against whom Lundqvist came in with a 24-7-5 record in 36 regular-season head-to-head games.
Instead, it was Brodeur getting the better of this matchup, outstanding in making 33 saves and getting his team to 6-7-5, taking seven points in the past four games. It was a similar result to Brodeur’s eight wins in 12 playoff games against Lundqvist, whose Rangers’ team had won six of the past seven, but now dropped back to an even 9-9-0.
“It’s just so disappointing,” said Lundqvist, who played admirably otherwise, making 25 stops, including a big one on a Jaromir Jagr breakaway with just under eight minutes remaining that kept the Rangers at a 2-1 deficit. “The way we fought back in the this game. Ahh. It just really bothers me.”
Just about five minutes after Jagr’s breakaway, Dan Girardi managed to get his first goal of the season on a long wrist shot in off the skate of Adam Larsson, the Devils’ young defenseman who was celebrating his 21st birthday by helping the Rangers tie it 2-2. Brodeur gave him a quick tap on the behind with his stick, and soon enough the two were celebrating.
That’s because with 2:55 remaining, Dainus Zubrus whacked the puck out of a melee in front and over Lundqvist’s glove, quickly quieting the 18,006 in attendance, who were rather subdued from the beginning in this early-season rivalry game.
“I don’t know how it went in,” Lundqvist said about the game-winner. “I kind of lost track. It was like two or three sticks hitting it at the same time.”
Of course, no matter how much it seemed like it, the game wasn’t entirely determined by the play of Lundqvist and Brodeur. The Rangers power play, which had garnered some momentum by scoring once in each of the previous two games, looked horrid in going 0-for-5 over 8:57 of man-advantage time.
And although they got 35 shots on net, and out-attempted the Devils 63-51, the only other goal they got past Brodeur was Marc Staal’s long slap shot that went in off the near post early in the second, negating Carter’s first goal of the game — and his first goal of the season — just 18 seconds before.
“To lose a game in the last five minutes, it’s always tough,” Staal said. “We’ll learn from it, and move on.”