There’s no shame in losing to the formidable Blues, and certainly not in as competitive and blue collar a match as was the Rangers’ 2-1 defeat at the Garden on Thursday.
Nevertheless, with this one coming on top of Tuesday’s sloppy defeat to the Islanders, the Blueshirts have lost two straight in regulation for the first time since dropping three in a row Dec. 8-12. As such, even following the preceding 11-3-1 roll, they are clear of a playoff spot by just one point over the Flyers, who hold one game in hand.Yankee Stadium, where the Rangers play their next two on Sunday against the Devils and on Wednesday against the Islanders, awaits, but the Blueshirts cannot wait to put an end to this recent reversal of fortune.
“We can’t simply accept this and look at this as only a little dip,” Rick Nash, who scored his fifth goal in the last three games and 10th in the last 10 matches, told The Post. “Good teams always have a sense of urgency when they lose a game or two.
“Saying we were better than we were against the Islanders isn’t going to make it for us,” he said. “We have to go into Sunday’s game with the mentality of having to win it.”
The Rangers’ work ethic was exemplary against a St. Louis club that doesn’t yield an inch on the ice for free. The Blueshirts battled minute by minute, shift by shift and zone by zone. They gave up one goal five-on-five on a ricochet off a skate midway through the first and gave up the tie-breaking and ultimate winning goal on the power play early in the third, but they never for a minute gave up.
“Our compete-level in this one compared to the Islanders’ game was much, much better,” said Ryan Callahan, who spent essentially the entire game in the trenches. “From that perspective, it was like night and day.”
The Blues’ got their winner on Kevin Shattenkirk’s blast from 45 feet away through a David Backes screen at 3:09 of third, just nine seconds after Nash went to the box for slashing Shattenkirk. That’s all the time it took for St. Louis to convert after Backes beat Dominic Moore on a right-wing draw.
“You have to work really hard to find those pucks. They are pretty good getting in front and creating chances like that where you have to work really hard to pick shots up,” said a blameless Henrik Lundqvist. “I thought we played really well five-on-five.
“The difference is, they won the special-teams game with one goal.”
The Rangers’ power play that had been on a roll during the club’s northward drive in the standings went south in this one, 0-for-3 overall with just one shot, 0-for-2 in the third without a shot in 3:57 on the man-advantage, failing both early and late in the final period with St. Louis pressuring the top and closing off space.
“It was the first time in a long time I think our power play let us down,” said Brad Richards, on the point for 4:58. “We were just not pounding the puck.
“If there’s anything that wasn’t on, that was it,” he said. “It was a good hockey game. We played a real good hockey team.”
The Blues are fourth overall in the NHL, only a handful of points behind pace-setting Anaheim. They’re big and strong and disciplined.
The Rangers had more puck possession and zone time as the match progressed. They worked to get to the front against Jaroslav Halak. They battled to chip puck out of their own end and move it through the neutral zone without getting caught.
The Blueshirts in fact accomplished many of their objectives in cleaning up what had been an uncommonly sloppy performance against the Islanders. But they weren’t quite good enough, so now they go into the Stadium on a two-game losing streak.
“We have to nip it quickly,” Callahan told The Post. “It can get away from you before you know it.”