One team at Madison Square Garden on Sunday was gunning for the top spot in the Eastern Conference while the other was desperately trying to cling to the foothold it so recently gained in the playoff race.
And if you didn’t know which was which, it wouldn’t have been hard to figure it out.
The Rangers didn’t need a dramatic late comeback to beat the Islanders this time, doing so 5-2 on an afternoon where even after initially going down, the Blueshirts always had a veneer of control.
The visiting Islanders, now winless in all eight games they’ve played on the second end of a back-to-back this year, saw their losing streak slide to four games and were forced to wait for the outcome of the Red Wings-Penguins game later in the day to assess the damage to their playoff hopes.
Suffice to say, though, that they are going in the wrong direction at the wrong time.
There are no such worries for the Rangers.
Now winners of five of six games since the trade deadline, Peter Laviolette’s side shifted around its bottom six, with Jimmy Vesey moving to the fourth line while Jonny Brodzinski went to the third, and played a hard, grinding game to back it up.
The Rangers forechecked all game long, got below the hash marks and frequently hemmed in an Islanders side that tried multiple combinations in its defensive pairs, but never found one that worked.
The only bad news for the Rangers came in the second period, when Ryan Lindgren went down following a hit from Jean-Gabrel Pageau and did not return to the game, with the team citing a lower-body injury.
As for the on-ice play, though, it was smooth sailing.
Keeping the same changes that Patrick Roy tried in his top six late in Saturday’s loss to Ottawa, with Kyle Palmieri and Mat Barzal switching spots, didn’t help the Islanders.
The defense and forwards played another disconnected game — a hallmark of this losing streak — and the Isles were again left with only a scattered offensive game.
Still, that ended up being enough for them to hang around, at least until a third period in which the Rangers completely and totally asserted their dominance.
With the away side needing a push after going into the third period down 3-2, it was instead the Blueshirts who got one. Kaapo Kakko finished off a long offensive zone shift by beating Ilya Sorokin clean from the right circle at the 2:36 mark, all but cementing the result.
Then — with pretty much zero semblance of momentum for the Islanders in between — K’Andre Miller fed Alexis Lafreniere for a free look in the slot, which Lafreniere promptly converted.
One side played composed and physically asserted itself. The other never came close to doing so.
And with “Igor’s Better” chants filling The Garden on Sunday, it is at least clear that Sorokin — who let in five of 30 shots he saw — is not going to single handedly take the Islanders to the playoffs again.
The Rangers had gone down on Bo Horvat’s first-period goal, but tied it up in short order, with Mika Zibanejad getting into the slot unimpeded for a one-timer just 27 seconds into the second period.
Will Cuylle took advantage of another defensive breakdown to make it 2-1 off the rush at the 10:14 mark.
Horvat re-tied the game at two less than four minutes later, muscling through Barclay Goodrow to clean up the rebound on Mike Reilly’s initial shot.
But that momentum was short-lived as Brodzinski tipped Miller’s shot past Sorokin at the 15:01 mark, with the Islanders’ netminder getting a piece of the puck before it ended up in the back of his net.
At five-on-five, though, the Rangers outworked and out-generated the Islanders, and reaped the rewards.
