DETROIT – Rangers coach Gerard Gallant was asked before Wednesday’s game against the Detroit Red Wings if he feared his team, playing on the second night of a back-to-back, and coming off a huge win Tuesday over the Penguins in Pittsburgh, might suffer a letdown against the lowly Red Wings.
“They're out of the playoffs, but they're not going to give you the game,’’ Gallant said of the Red Wings. “They’ve got a lot of pride. They're playing for the next year's contracts … to see where they're going to be, and some of them are free agents, so they're not going to quit. They're going to work hard. And for our group, it's about playing every night and doing the best you can.’’
Considering the back-to-back thing, the Rangers actually played pretty well, rallying from three one-goal deficits before Andrew Copp scored 1:34 into overtime as the Rangers beat the Red Wings, 5-4.
It was the Rangers' fourth win in a row.
Copp won a faceoff in his own end of the ice and the Rangers broke up the ice, with Copp sending a pass to Artemi Panarin, who returned it for Copp at the left wing post. Copp beat Red Wings goalie Alex Nedeljkovic for his second goal as a Ranger to win it and give the Rangers a sweep of the two-game road trip.
The Rangers had trailed 4-3 on Adam Erne’s goal at 5:56 of the third period, but Chris Kreider’s 46th goal of the season, at 16:22, tied it, 4-4 and forced the overtime. The goal was Kreider’s NHL-leading 24th power-play goal, which tied the Rangers’ single season franchise record, set by Jaromir Jagr in 2005-06.
With the victory, the Rangers opened a three-point lead over the Pittsburgh Penguins in the race for second place in the Metropolitan Division. They also reduced their magic number for clinching a playoff spot to six points, with 14 games remaining.
The Rangers could have used a strong performance from goaltender Alexandar Georgiev, starting in place of Igor Shesterkin, but Georgiev let up two awful goals in the first period, and the Rangers were fortunate to be tied, 2-2, thanks to goals from Ryan Reaves and Filip Chytil.
Reaves, back in the lineup for a second straight game with Ryan Strome (lower body injury) still out, got it started early, scoring his third goal 3:23 into the game. He tried to pass across the crease to Tyler Motte, but the puck hit a Detroit defender and came right back to him, and he popped it against Red Wings goalie Alex Nedeljkovic.
But Michael Rasmussen beat Georgiev with an unscreened shot from the left point that went off the goalie’s stick and in, at 9:59, and then, with the Wings on a power play, Jakub Vrana gave Detroit a 2-1 lead at 17:23, on an unscreened wrist shot from the top of the right wing circle.
Chytil got that goal back 11 seconds later, when he tipped in a shot by Patrik Nemeth to make it 2-2, but Tyler Bertuzzi scored on another power play 29 seconds into the second period to put Detroit back in front.
Artemi Panarin, though, tied it, 3-3 at 12:15 of the second, when he came off the bench and drove straight to the net to finish off a feed from Frank Vatrano from behind the net.
