NY Rangers Goal Breakdown: Buffalo’s Backup Beats Blueshirts

The NY Rangers, fresh off a big win over the Toronto Maple Leafs, laid an egg at home against the Buffalo Sabres. This was a game where the Rangers, who need 1.5 points per game to hit 98 points on the season to hopefully make the playoffs, needed to get the two points, and they just didn’t show get it done. Nothing went the Rangers’ way, and it started before the puck even dropped.

David Quinn shook up the lines that dominated Toronto, which was probably the first red flag. The second was Carter Hutton starting, as the Rangers seem to always have issues with backups. That’s probably just recency bias though. Third, the Rangers seem to have issues with playing down to opponents, specifically after beating up on a playoff team.

Sabres 1, Rangers 0

This was a little of a rough shift. It was long, and only resulted in a clear to the neutral zone, as opposed to a full clear or possession exit. The resulting turnover from Mika Zibanejad and half a line change led to a miscommunication on who was covering Colin Miller. Meanwhile Zibanejad skated away from Girgensons to be the third man on Miller, leaving the passing lane open. There was a lot of hate on Staal on this one because he was the one who made the effort on Girgensons’ power move, but the passing lane should have been covered by Zibanejad.

Sabres 2, Rangers 0

Ryan Lindgren’s pass in the offensive zone got picked off and the Sabres turned it quickly. Sam Reinhart burned Filip Chytil to take the breakout pass then roofed it over Georgiev.

Sabres 3, Rangers 0

Jimmy Vesey split the Rangers defense after a great pass from Jack Eichel. Makes you wonder how he was able to split the defense so easily, or why Brendan Lemieux was one of the guys back.

Sabres 3, Rangers 1

Tap your stick to this Artemi Panarin pass and just move on to the next one, Sabres.

Sabres 3, Rangers 2

https://twitter.com/RangersMSGN/status/1225971304320376832

Speed kills, and Mika Zibanejad drove the net with two Rangers in front. Eventually Chris Kreider got a rebound and Carter Hutton got the shot, but it trickled through just over the goal line.

Shot Heatmap

Interesting tidbit: The game itself seemed boring but it was pretty high event with both teams combining for 109 shot attempts. The reason? Less than half were actual scoring chances and only 23 were considered high danger. The Rangers had a stranglehold on the scoring chances and high danger chances, while also controlling the overall shot attempts. Mistakes killed them this game.

Skater Results

Marc Staal has a rough outing the day that I write he might actually be having a decent season, because, of course he does. I do want to focus on the expected goals chart on the right, in which the Rangers really did own the Sabres. A lot of this is skewed for the third period when the Sabres turtled, but the Blueshirts did have a big quality advantage in the first two periods as well. This is consistent with how they’ve played all year, quality over quantity.

This was a bad loss for a team hoping to make the playoffs. Luckily they don’t have much time to stew on it, as they have another one on Sunday against the lowly Kings. This one should be interesting as the Kings are a good process team with no skill outside of Anze Kopitar.