Senators were ‘slapped in the face’ by Rangers in Game 3
NEW YORK – The Ottawa Senators had dug themselves a two-goal hole, getting out-hustled by a desperate New York Rangers team in the first 20 minutes of Game 3 on Tuesday night. If the Senators were going to rally at MSG, and potentially take a 3-0 series lead, they needed to play mistake-free hockey from that point on.
Instead, in the second period, Erik Karlsson and Mark Stone ran into each other in the neutral zone, allowing the Rangers an odd-man rush that resulted in a back-breaking Rick Nash goal.
It was that kind of night.
“We both read the same thing, and we took each other’s spots. Unfortunately, that can happen in games like this. That’s one of those mistakes you shouldn’t accept. And we don’t. It’s our own fault,” said Karlsson, after the Rangers’ 4-1 win over the Senators, to cut the series deficit to 2-1.
“We didn’t have the jump that we needed. We didn’t do the small things right. We gave them too much room, and they got to feel good about themselves.”
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Rangers coach Alain Vigneault said the team’s dominating first period was a result of an extra day of rest between games, as well as the expected desperation of a team staring at a 2-0 hole.
Senators coach Guy Boucher said his team’s flat opening first period was unforgivable.
“We killed ourselves in the first period,” he said, as the Rangers outshot the Senators, 15-5, the first. “If you look at our game, we were off. Off on our passes, off on our everything. When you give away 20 minutes like that, you don’t deserve to win.”
Ottawa saw several dud performances in Game 3. Derrick Brassard played his third straight game without a point, this time skating to a minus-2. Rookie defenseman Ben Harpur showed his inexperience on the Rangers’ first two goals. And while Erik Karlsson again led his team in Corsi at 5-on-5 with a plus-12, he was a minus-3 and didn’t have a point.
“The whole team was off. We’re a team oriented group. I’m not going to point fingers at this guy or that guy,” said Boucher, when asked about Karlsson.
Karlsson said it was just a bad night for the Senators. “It wasn’t a great performance from our team today. Unfortunately, that’s how it is sometimes,” he said.
So now the Rangers have shown what they can do with their backs against the wall, and the Senators have shown what happens when they can’t match that intensity.
So what does that mean for Game 4 on Thursday? Will the Senators play with more urgency than they showed with a two-game lead?
“You can talk about urgency as much as you want, but to create it superficially is very difficult. I think our players knew what to do. But to know and to feel are two different things,” said Boucher.
“We knew [how they’d come out]. But it’s not about knowing, it’s about living it. Well, now we lived it. We got slapped in the face.”
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Greg Wyshynski is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter. His book, TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PUCK, is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.
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