NEW YORK — It wasn’t a six-goal outburst, as they’d produced in the third period of their blowout win over Detroit on Thursday. But the three goals the Rangers scored over a 9-minute, 34-second span bridging the second and third periods Sunday against the Arizona Coyotes counted as a mini-explosion, and one sorely needed for a team that had had reason to question itself.
Barclay Goodrow and Adam Fox scored in the final five minutes of the second period, and Chris Kreider tacked on a power-play goal at 4:39 of the third to put the Rangers in the driver’s seat, and they returned home from their two-game road trip to Detroit and Nashville to beat the Coyotes, 4-1, Sunday at the Garden.
Igor Shesterkin made 31 saves to earn his eighth win of the season as the Rangers improved to 8-6-3 before leaving for a four-game West Coast trip to Seattle and California this week.
The victory erased some of the sour taste of Saturday’s 2-1 loss to the Predators in Nashville, a game in which the Rangers had outshot the Predators 35-18 and left talking about how they’d played well but the pucks wouldn’t go in for them. They went in on Sunday night, with fourth-line center Ryan Carpenter, back in the lineup after sitting out the last three games, scoring his first goal as a Ranger at 11:43 of the third period, after Clayton Keller’s power-play goal at 8:33 had broken Shesterkin’s shutout bid.
Both teams were playing on the second straight night, but the Rangers had flown home overnight from Nashville, where the Coyotes had only to drive across the Hudson River after playing the Devils in Newark on Saturday. So that may have had something to do with how little hitting there was in the opening period and the fact that Arizona outshot the Rangers, 17-3. (Ryan Lindgren’s shorthanded breakaway effort as he came out of the penalty box at 12:22 was not recorded by the officials.)
The second period started off much the same way as the first period had gone, except the Rangers kept taking penalties. But somehow it seemed the Blueshirts were actually starting to generate offensive momentum on their penalty kill. And eventually, at 15:05, 16 seconds after Vincent Trocheck came out of the penalty box following his interference penalty, the Rangers got on the board first on a goal by Goodrow.
Jacob Trouba, at the end of his shift, pushed the puck up to Trocheck in the offensive zone and drove to the net. Trocheck sent a pass to Trouba that failed to connect, but the Coyotes turned the puck over, when defenseman Juuso Valimaki’s attempted clearing pass went off the stick of teammate Dylan Guenther and ricocheted on net, forcing goalie Connor Ingram to make a save. The rebound went straight to Goodrow, who whipped a shot past Ingram for his fourth goal of the season.
The Rangers woke up after that, and quickly doubled their lead on a brilliant individual effort from Fox, who went behind the Arizona net and sent a pass out to Filip Chytil in front. Chytil’s shot was blocked, but Fox circled the net and retrieved the loose puck, skated to the slot and fired a wrist shot past Ingram to make it 2-0 at 16:23.
Shesterkin has not been the same goaltender he was last season, when he won the Vezina Trophy as the league’s top netminder, leading the league in both goals-against average save percentage. His 2.53 GAA and .909 save percentage were pretty mundane. He was 18th overall in the league in GAA and 27th overall in save percentage.
