EDMONTON — Pavel Dorofeyev scored his second goal in as many games Saturday evening to send a soaring Rangers team into the third period with a commanding four-goal lead against the Kraken.
Compared to how the Blueshirts got Kraken goalie Joey Daccord pulled 13:53 into the game, Seattle combined for just five high-danger chances and hardly challenged Finnish netminder Joonas Korpisalo through his first two NHL periods of the season.
Once old friend Kaapo Kakko broke through less than two minutes into the final frame, however, the Rangers completely lost their grip on the game and gave up two more goals for a 4-3 final that was too close for comfort.
“Such a small thing that happens and kind of turns all the way around,” Korpisalo said after the win, which might have been salvaged by the Kraken’s Berkly Catton taking a holding penalty with 2:26 left in regulation. “Turns [out] to be a one-goal game. I think we played the last three, four minutes.”
The Rangers have been mostly dominant when playing with a lead, but the team needs to be better at managing momentum swings.
Entering their second meeting with Connor McDavid and the Oilers in the span of nine days on Monday, there’s no better time to start than against the ultimate momentum-changing player in the game.
McDavid didn’t even take 60 seconds to sway the Nov. 1 meeting at Madison Square Garden in his team’s favor.
If it’s not McDavid flying down the ice and scoring on his very first shift of the game, it will be Minnesota’s Kirill Kaprizov, Toronto’s Auston Matthews or Colorado’s Nathan MacKinnon. The Rangers have to develop the bandwidth to respond under such circumstances that are oftentimes unavoidable.
The proof is in their early showings against the upper echelon teams in the league.
Entering Sunday’s games, the Rangers held a 2-4 record against the six teams they’ve played ranked inside the top 10 in the NHL. Their two convincing wins over the Lightning represent their only victories against such opponents.
Otherwise, the Blueshirts have lost to the Oilers (3), the Bruins (4), the Devils (7) and the Senators (9).
“I think our team’s at its best when there’s a simplicity to our game,” head coach Mike Sullivan said Saturday. “Just playing straight ahead, playing with pace, playing with speed, playing behind teams, making defensemen turn and go back for pucks a lot. I think when we do that, we have the opportunity to play on top of teams, and then we can hang on to pucks and build an offensive zone game that’s hard to play against. I do think we’re defending hard, I thought we defended a little too much in the third period [Saturday night], but sometimes your best defense is having the puck in the offensive zone and possessing.
“And then in the defensive zone, we’ve got to make sure that we’re fronting those guys and we go out under control and we have some physicality to us so that we try to limit their ability to be part of the offense.”
