Rangers miss critical opportunity to bury Lightning

“You come at the king, you best not miss.” 

— Omar Little, HBO’s “The Wire” 

TAMPA, Fla. — The Rangers came gunning for the two-time champs on their home ice, you bet they did, taking everything the desperate Lightning had over the first 20 minutes while coming out of it unscathed. 

And when both Mika Zibanejad and Chris Kreider scored on the power play by the 9:44 mark of the second period, the Rangers were not only up 2-0 but close to taking command of this conference final. 

They were, in those moments, the young Cassius Clay giving a whooping to Sonny Liston in Miami in 1964. 

Except there was no chance — zero, nada, nyet — that the Lightning were going to concede and wave the white towel while sitting on their collective stool. Perception was not reality. The Rangers were not all that close, after all. 

The champs clawed their way back, dominating at five-on-five against every line but the Kids’ unit. They tied it just over one minute into the third period on their own second power-play goal, the first from Nikita Kucherov, the next from Steven Stamkos. The Rangers had been forced back on their stilettos and were never able to reverse course. 

Shot after shot came on Igor Shesterkin in a third period in which there were 16 draws in the Rangers’ end as opposed to seven in the offensive zone. And it was Ondrej Palat connecting on his team’s 51st shot off a gorgeous feed from Kucherov to beat the beleaguered netminder from the right circle at 19:18 of the third period to lift the Lightning to Sunday’s 3-2 Game 3 victory. 

Still, even while outplayed, even while the Blueshirts’ marquee players never got to their A-game under even the most generous of definitions, the Rangers were 30:16 away from the finish line with a two-goal lead. It is difficult to escape the sense that the good guys let the champs off the hook. 

The Rangers, though, did not see it that way. I would not have expected anything different. 

“I think we played a pretty good road game and put ourselves in a pretty good spot going into the third,” Kreider said. “I think what we’ll take from this game is the things we can do better that’s under our control.” 

The Blueshirts can sure do a far, far better job of getting the puck in deep and going to work below the hash marks. They can do a far, far better job of possessing the puck in the offensive zone. Andrei Vasilevskiy was sharper than he’d been at the Garden, when he allowed nine goals on 62 shots, but the Blueshirts rarely tested the netminder at five-on-five. 

The fact is, opposed for the most part by the Anthony Cirelli-Brandon Hagel-Alex Killorn checking unit, the Kreider-Zibanejad-Frank Vatrano line was overwhelmed at five-on-five, barely able to mount an attack and always pushed into a defensive posture. 

Ryan Strome went out of the game early in the second with a lower-body issue, and that did not help the five-on-five cause, but it’s not as if No. 16 had been playing with much authority until that point. If Kreider, Zibanejad and Vatrano struggled at five-on-five, so did Artemi Panarin. By the way, so did Adam Fox. So did Jacob Trouba, sent to the box for three different infractions, with Tampa Bay capitalizing on the first two of the resulting power plays. 

Before the puck was dropped, Lightning coach Jon Cooper had talked about the “magnitude” of the match. And down 2-0 in the series and then in Game 3, his team showed the magnitude of them. 

“It was 2-0, but there was a lot of hockey game left and they were playing desperate and their forecheck forced us into mistakes we don’t normally make,” Blueshirts head coach Gerard Gallant said. “I wouldn’t say we let it get away because they played really well, but we could have stolen one.” 

There is no reason to doubt the Rangers’ resilience coming up to Tuesday’s Game 4. If Strome is unavailable, perhaps Gallant will give more responsibility to the Kids. Regardless, there is good reason to expect more from Kreider and Zibanejad, who have been stifled by checking lines but have thrived when it’s power against power. There is good reason to expect more from Fox and Trouba. There is every reason to expect better attention to detail. 

But this series is as much about what the Lightning have left as what the Rangers will bring. It is probably plenty. 

The challengers had their shot on Sunday. 

They missed.