Recap: Rangers Fall to Coyotes in OT Despite Early Lead

The Rangers are having no problems leaping out to leads in recent games. But ushering the lead through 60 minutes has become a growing challenge.
For the second straight home game the Rangers raced out to a three-goal advantage, only to see it evaporate in the late stages. And so once more they were forced to settle for the single point out of a 4-3 overtime loss to the Arizona Coyotes on Friday night in the opener of a three-game homestand at Madison Square Garden.
Oliver Ekman-Larsson tied the score with 3:01 remaining, and Derek Stepan scored the game-winner with 31.1 seconds to play in the 3-on-3 overtime as the Blueshirts fell to 2-5-2 over the last nine, while the Coyotes snapped a four-game losing streak and beat the Rangers for the first time in more than five years.
"It's tough to accept this one. It was a game that was right there for us," Henrik Lundqvist said. "Our power play was really good, but we still had a lot more opportunities to put the game away. We didn't, and they come back in the end."

This on a night that had begun on such promising notes. With Mats Zuccarello and Pavel Buchnevich each returning from extended injury absences, it was Buchnevich who opened the scoring early in the first and Zuccarello who set up another one late in the period, giving the Rangers the early lead that Mika Zibanejad would extend in the second period. Kevin Hayes was the recipient of Zuccarello's setup, and Hayes also added an assist to give him six points (3-3-6) over his last three games.

Lundqvist made 30 saves but lost for just the second time in his last eight home starts (6-0-2), and it was Ekman-Larsson's equalizer that really had the goaltender shaking his head. With the Rangers clinging to their one-goal edge, the Arizona blueliner smacked a rolling puck from just off the left-wing wall that knuckled its way off iron and in.
"I would say that was the toughest shot all night," Lundqvist said. "He hit it clean standing up. It was a rocket but at the same time a knucklepuck.
"I don't know what to say about it. It's a nothing play, and he rips it like I don't know what. It went up and down and side to side. I don't know what else to say. It just didn't bounce our way the last five or six minutes."
The Rangers now continue their homestand on Sunday afternoon against a Vegas Golden Knights team that also let a 3-0 lead slip away on Friday night, losing 5-4 in overtime in Newark.
At the Garden, Stepan's winner came after a sequence where each goaltender - Lundqvist and rookie Adin Hill - made sparkling saves at either end to keep their team alive. But just over a half-minute before the shootout was to come, the ex-Ranger drifted toward the middle on a three-man rush, dragged the puck and fired.

"He just put it in a perfect place, right between your ear and your glove, and I couldn't get my glove up there," Lundqvist said. "Sometimes when they slow up like that you start thinking a little too much, analyzing, Where's he going to pass it? And then he rips it like that. It was a good shot, but obviously I wish I had come up with the save."
But the major regret for the Rangers is that, playing only their second home game so far in December, they hewed too close to the first, when on Dec. 2 they held a 3-0 lead after two periods and wound up with a 4-3 shootout loss to the Winnipeg Jets.
"It's tough to sit here again and talk about a lead that we can't hold," Zibanejad said.
"I think it's mental," David Quinn said. The coach said he looked back on when the Rangers were in the thick of their seven-game Garden winning streak spanning October and November: Back then, when his players would grab a lead, "they never stopped," Quinn said, "they just kept playing, they didn't let the score dictate, they didn't play scared. And that's what we're doing right now.
"Maybe because we're going through this tough time, we're not confident enough, but we better get out of it in a hurry. Can't have a three-goal lead, and a 3-1 lead going into the third period, and do what we did."

Not to be lost in the manic ending Friday night was the fact that the Rangers netted three power-play goals against the NHL's No. 1-ranked penalty kill (90.7 percent coming in), which had not allowed a single power-play goal since Nov. 25, and had not allowed multiple power-play goals in any game this season.
And yet, even on a 3-for-7 night on power plays, the Rangers still came away frustrated with their man-advantage, mainly because they had a stretch late in the second period of a 3-1 game with two full minutes of 5-on-3 time, and four straight minutes of power play overall as three Coyotes committed minors within a span of 1:19.
Asked about the power play being one positive for the Blueshirts, Zuccarello responded, "Yeah, but I still think we should tuck one in there 5-on-3 and kill the game right there. That's on us. If we could get a goal there it would have been over."
Zuccarello, back in the lineup after missing 13 of the last 15 games to a groin injury, made an immediate impact, working a give-and-go with Filip Chytil that drew the game's first penalty - which Buchnevich, back after sitting out 13 games with a broken thumb, cashed in 4:01 into the game with a one-timer of Chytil's feed.
Hayes made it 2-0 at 17:26 when Zuccarello settled a puck and fired it onto Hayes' stickblade at the front of the net. Zibanejad wired one off a Hayes faceoff win at 5:48 of the second to give the Rangers their third goal in three power plays to that point.

But with Hill (27 saves) holding the fort from there, the Coyotes made the most of the chance their rookie netminder gave them. Jordan Oesterle struck first at 10:42 of the second, on a power play that came when Neal Pionk went after Christian Fischer for running into Lundqvist. Josh Archibald made it a one-goal game with 6:49 to play by finishing Stepan's feed from the goal line. Then Ekman-Larsson stepped into the rolling puck and Stepan finished the back-and-forth OT.
"That was a tough one. We had it. There's no excuse for that," Zuccarello said. "I think we were the better team, we should have won this game, but that's hockey sometimes."
"We've had flashes, we've had moments within games - we haven't put it together for 60 minutes," said Quinn. "Good news is we play Sunday afternoon at 12:30, so we don't have to let this sit for very long."
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