Recap: Penalties a Problem for Rangers in Loss to Bruins

BOSTON -- The Rangers gave the Boston Bruins all they could handle this season, and on Wednesday night were gunning for their second season sweep in three years of one of their oldest rivals, and one of this season's top teams in the NHL.
But after more than 160 minutes going toe-to-toe with the Bruins, it was the final 10 where everything took a sideways turn.
The Rangers still can savor a win in the season series with the Bruins, but it took on a bitter aftertaste with Wednesday 6-3 defeat. Battling their way back into the game, the Rangers simply didn't play enough of the third period at full strength: Locked in a familiar tight game against the Bruins, the Rangers went shorthanded four times in the final 21½ minutes of the game, including their second minor of the evening for too-many-men. And the Bruins made them pay dearly, scoring four power-play goals on the night, three of them in the third period alone.
"They killed us, their power play," said Henrik Lundqvist. "You need to play a smart game against good teams. We did a lot of good things. But we shot ourselves in the foot for sure."

"It's hard enough to win in this league when you don't beat yourself," added David Quinn. "We did a lot of good things early, hanging around with a really good hockey team, and then just imploded."
Mika Zibanejad scored twice in the game to hit the 30-goal mark for the first time in his career - with four of those goals coming in Boston and five of them in three games overall against the Bruins in 2018-19, most of any player in the NHL.

Ryan Strome scored one to tighten the game in the third period, and he added an assist, while Pavel Buchnevich's helper on Zibanejad's first-period beauty upped the 23-year-old's points streak to a career-high five games.
Ultimately, though, this night belonged to David Pastrnak, Boston's 22-year-old winger who scored his fifth career hat trick and set a new career high in goals. Pastrnak had a hand in each of Boston's first five scores on the night, scoring three of them himself and setting up teammates on two others. Patrice Bergeron and Jake DeBrusk were on the receiving ends of those setups, while Brad Marchand had three assists as he and Bergeron upped their home points streak to 17 games, and Jaroslav Halak made 20 saves to improve to 19-8-1 in his career against the Rangers.
The Bruins won for the 12th straight time on home ice, and haven't lost in regulation here since the Rangers defeated them back on Jan. 19, another game in which Zibanejad potted a pair.
Lundqvist, taking his 50th start this season - he became the seventh goaltender in NHL history to play in 50 or more games in 12 different seasons - had entered with a three-game winning streak in Boston over which he had allowed a total of five goals. But he was saddled with the loss on a night when the home team went 4-for-6 on power plays, with at least four of the goals in the game utterly unstoppable.

"You know they have so many weapons," Lundqvist said of the Bruins. "You try to take away the cross pass, they go in and shoot for the tip; you take away the guy in the middle and they go across. They exposed us big-time."
The Rangers had done a superb job of holding those weapons in check since the teams first played in January: The first two meetings were slim-margin, one-goal affairs, and Wednesday's clash seemed for much of the game to be shaping up that way, too.
Pastrnak got the scoring started just 2:48 in, driving a one-timer of Marchand feed across the slot to cash in the first of two Ranger minors for too many men, a source of deep frustration in their room after the game. "Knowing what kind of power play they have, we take two too-many-men out there, and it's not acceptable," Zibanejad said. "We can't do that if we're going to give ourselves a chance. It's disappointing."
Zibanejad, though, matched that score with a power-play tally of his own, at 16:29, on a beautiful finish of a beautiful play up the ice with Buchnevich gaining the line and Strome drawing pressure to free up Zibanejad, who flipped a shot past Halak's catching glove.

The Bruins made it 3-1 with two goals off rushes, in the second period by Pastrnak and at 3:19 of the third by DeBrusk - and it might have been 4-1 if not for Lundqvist's miraculous stick save that stole one from Chris Wagner.
Strome brought the Rangers back in it with 14:17 to play, finding daylight between Halak's pads as he and Brett Howden hacked away at the rebound of Brady Skjei's sharp-angle shot.
But the Rangers' pushback only made what came next all the more frustrating. Strome was in the box for holding when Pastrnak completed his third hat trick this season with a one-timer of Torey Krug's feed, and shortly after that Boston made good on both ends of a 1:29 two-man advantage, on Bergeron's redirect of Pastrnak's pass onto his tape and McAvoy's wrister from up top.
"It was too bad. We kept fighting," said Lundqvist. "We were down a goal and then we started taking way too many penalties, and it killed us. And now we sit here and we don't feel very good about how that ended."
The Rangers will look to rebound when they host the St. Louis Blues on Friday night at the Garden, their final game against a Western Conference team this season.