It was getting late, everyone was tired, the Rangers and Canes had grinded through 86 minutes of heavyweight hockey, leaving nothing but the best of themselves on the ice.
The score was 3-3 early in the second overtime at the Garden on Tuesday and the Broadway Five was on the ice, granted an opportunity to get the Rangers their sixth straight playoff victory and a 2-0 lead in this second-round series.
It was not going to get too much later when the Broadway Five came on, when the Rangers’ first power-play unit came on, featuring Chris Kreider, Mika Zibanejad, Artemi Panarin, Adam Fox and Vincent Trocheck, the new kid on the block who joined this group last season.
It was not going to get later at all because Trocheck slipped one through Frederik Andersen’s five-hole from just outside the crease at 7:24 of double overtime to give the Blueshirts a 2-0 lead in this second-round series that moves to Raleigh, N.C., for the next two with Game 3 coming up Thursday.
The dirty little secret of hockey is that almost nobody knows exactly how goals are scored at any given moment. Let’s face it, most overtime goals do not resemble David Pastrnak’s in Game 7. There are flurries of bodies and legs and sticks and a little disc and there are times when the puck going in is arbitrary. People don’t like to admit that they can’t tell you how a particular puck went in.
Trocheck had no such problem.
“I can’t tell how it went in,” said Trocheck, who has 10 points (5-5) in the tournament and tied the franchise record by scoring in five straight playoff games first established by Cecil Dillon in 1933. “I’ll watch it and let you know.”
The power play had gone 2-for-2 against the NHL’s most efficient penalty-killing team in a total of 23 seconds in Sunday’s 4-3 Game 1 victory and had gone 8-for-18 entering this match after finishing at 84.5 percent.
There is a swagger to this group and there was a swagger when this quintet took the ice at 6:37 of the second overtime after Brady Skjei cross-checked Trocheck. The PP had scored once in its previous six chances, Kreider knotting the score 3-3 by banging in a Trocheck rebound at 6:07 of the third, the Rangers knotting the score for the third time after also trailing 1-0 and 2-1.
But here they were lining up at the left dot, still in the game because of the outstanding work of Igor Shesterkin, who faced 57 shots on the night. The Canes had the man-advantage for the final 1:38 of regulation and had two glorious shorthanded opportunities to win it, only to be denied by Shesterkin.
“I think we’re confident for sure. I think we do expect to score though obviously that’s not going to happen all the time,” Trocheck said. “We feel that as a unit, the team relies on us to score on the power play.
“Specialty teams are huge in these games. We know we’re relied on a lot and there’s a lot of pressure in that but when we have this confidence, this rhythm, we’re just trying to do the same to keep this going.”
The nastiness ramped up in this one in which Carolina had the better of territorial advantage were able to escape their zone without much fuss and were able to hem in the Rangers repeatedly.
But the Rangers stood their ground and Shesterkin, who was essentially slew-footed by the edgy Andre Svechnikov in the first period, was massive in earning his first playoff overtime victory in four games.
Alexis Lafreniere scored twice in a commanding effort to commemorate Pingpong Ball Day in a game in which the Rangers had difficulty creating time and space. Remember how much of an issue moving Lafreniere was the last couple of years under Gerard Gallant?
Well in this one, when head coach Peter Laviolette mixed his lines because Matt Rempe didn’t get off the bench after the second period, Lafreniere stayed on the right and Kaapo Kakko shifted to the left while skating in the third period with Alex Wennberg.
Jacob Trouba had a tough night, oh boy, called for three penalties while committing an egregious giveaway on Carolina’s 3-2 goal. The captain will need to clean it up. On the other hand, Jack Roslovic has been a revelation.
The Rangers merely held serve here. Two years ago, the Blueshirts and Canes played a homer series for six games, Carolina going up 2-0 and 3-2, before the Rangers took Game 7 in Raleigh to advance to the conference finals.
So the fight is not done and not done by a long shot.
But when the Broadway Five steps onto the ice, the finish line seems a little bit closer.
