Blair Betts has a broken eye socket, for which the Capitals will be rewarded in tonight’s Game 7 by the privilege of using a player in the place of Donald Brashear. It will be a better one than the Washington goon, who put the Rangers’ valuable…

WE have only Jim Schoenfeld’s word for it that John Tortorella is remorseful for throwing a water bottle, brandishing a stick toward a fan and ending up suspended for a game in which the Rangers failed to nail down what would have been one of the…

FROM his penalty box high above Madison Square Garden, a forlorn John Tortorella presumably felt shame. Considering the ample bench experience of Jim Schoenfeld, the worst of the Tortorella’s water-bottle-firing and stick-threatening tantrum was…

CAPITALS to the right of Henrik Lundqvist, Capitals to his left, Capitals dead on. And he eyed them all. Michal Rozsival was in the penalty box for a borderline second-period hold of Thomas Fleischmann. A high-powered No. 2 seed’s season’s was…

BECAUSE the two goals that changed everything in Game 3 came on shots taken from behind Henrik Lundqvist, it is of tremendous reassurance that he has nothing to put behind him. “Henrik played very well, yes he did,” John Tortorella said yesterday…

ALEXANDER Ovechkin still doesn’t have a goal, and the Rangers still lead the series. Statistics and damn lies to anyone who watched Game 3 and who therefore could not have taken their eyes off the best hockey player in the world. Ovechkin…

The goalie, says John Tortorella, is the “mind of a hockey team.” In the playoffs, he can become the mind of the other hockey team, too. If the Capitals really are wondering how they ever are going to get a puck past Henrik Lundqvist, then there…

With just one more game tonight in Philadelphia until what coach John Tortorella calls “the real stuff, not that regular-season [junk],” the Rangers practiced yesterday like the grind had gotten too long, not like it is just beginning. “Come…

THE winningest regular-season goalie of all-time didn’t become so by beating Henrik Lundqvist, that’s for certain. Should the Rangers and Devils find each other this spring for a third first-round matchup in four years, Martin Brodeur will have a…

THE line separating eighth place from ninth is almost as thin as the difference in the Rangers the last months under Tom Renney from the way they showed up in Sunday night’s loss, perhaps thinner even than the red goal-line itself. Nik Zherdev…