To begin, here was John Tortorella’s take on the Rangers’ first period tonight:
“I thought we had good energy to start the game. Even through when the goals were being scored on us, I still thought we had some good energy with our forecheck. We couldn’t finish at first, but we stayed with it, and continued to stay with it. We got rewarded at the end, though certainly not enough.
“I don’t agree that we were all that bad in the first period. They have four, five shots and it’s 3-nothing - that doesn’t help momentum as far as within your club.”
Here’s an alternate take, one shared by at least one writer in the press box and every player that writer talked to afterward - the first five minutes were passable, and the rest was awful. When the Rangers left town, following Glen Sather’s locker-room address following Wednesday’s Garden loss to Carolina, not one of them glossed over the importance of this trip, and the importance of starting it right and in a sense starting from square one. They flew in here a day early to acclimate themselves and prepare. And that was an adequate first period?
“It killed us, our first period,” Michael Del Zotto said - and that was more to the tune of what those players were saying.
In the end, because the Rangers came back and made a game of it late, penalties become a regrettable storyline for them - what they did well in the third, they might have been able to do well in the second had they not gone to the penalty box four times in the period (plus twice more in the third). The penalty kill finished 7-for-7 - this after the PK had given up a power-play goal in seven straight games; its previous perfect ledger came on Jan. 14 against Ottawa - but if the Rangers got their feet under them at first intermission, they could never get them walking forward in the second period.
Three of those penalties, by the way, were on Michal Rozsival, including one set up by his own blue-line cough-up that sent the Coyotes down 2-on-1 that Johnson had to mop up. (Tortorella thought Rozsival’s penalty at 18:05 of the third was an absurd call; also absurd is how Rozsival is listed on the scoresheet with zero giveaways. Can we just lose that useless stat already?)
Chad Johnson - thrown into the nets when Henrik Lundqvist came down with the flu (Lundqvist is a game-time decision for tomorrow night in Denver) - showed some shakiness in that first (Shane Doan’s 1-on-2 goal to open the scoring was a bad one all around), but once again, the rookie deserves credit for how he regrouped. He faced only three shots in the final period, but several of his 11 second-period saves were very tough ones, and he kept it from turning into a real rout.
“It’s really positive. He stayed within himself,” Tortorella said of Johnson. “It’s a shaky first period, but I thought he came back really well. For a young man in that situation, he didn’t get into a panic. He battled through it, so that’s a good sign for him.”
“You just have to forget about the first period and move on,” Johnson said. “I think we all wanted to forget about it.”
Almost all.
COOL!