The Rangers proved that revenge is a dish best served on ice.
Three days after the Blue Jackets denied them their 11th straight win and in turn, a new franchise record, the Rangers got the last laugh in their third and final meeting with a double empty-net-goal abetted 4-1 victory over Columbus at Madison Square Garden.
The response was important, but the win also pushed the Blueshirts into a first-place tie with the Canucks for the most points in the NHL.
Yes, first-year coach Peter Laviolette and the Rangers sit atop the league with just two games left until the March 8 trade deadline and 22 contests remaining in the regular season.
This is the first team to hit 40 wins.
Chris Drury has necessary moves to make, but if the last three weeks have told the Rangers’ president and general manager anything, it’s that his team is worth the investment.
The top of the NHL appears to be wide open, with some teams over-performing and others underperforming in contrast to what was originally expected.
The Rangers were always meant to be contenders, but the way they’ve owned the No. 1 spot in the Metropolitan Division almost all season long has been impressive.
Even coming off a horrid January, the Rangers have managed to hold their position.
And with goalie Igor Shesterkin back at the top of his game — most recently shown in another 30-save performance — the possibilities seem endless for the Rangers.
Not enough has been made about the Rangers’ change in approach to faceoffs.
Sure, their team win percentage is ranked in the top five in the NHL, but it’s the way they look to make something happen off the draw nowadays that has upped their faceoff game.
That was how they got things started in the second period, when Artemi Panarin won possession of the puck and whipped it in off of Vincent Trocheck’s faceoff.
The goal gave Panarin 80 points on the season for the fourth time since the star Russian wing joined the organization in 2019-20.
Trocheck later laid out Columbus forward Johnny Gaudreau, who hit the ice hard and missed the remainder of the middle frame before returning at the start of the third.
After initially calling it a major in order to review the play, officials only penalized Mathieu Olivier for his retaliatory cross check on Trocheck.
Chris Kreider’s takeaway in the O-zone then allowed him to set up Adam Fox for a power-play goal and the 2-0 lead.
The Rangers could’ve had a multi-goal lead entering the first intermission on the multitude of shots they had that missed twine by mere inches.
It was a defensively clean and offensively aggressive period for the home team, who had a locked in Shesterkin behind them to make nine saves.
Elvis Merzlikins, however, matched that tenfold with 17 stops in the opening 20 minutes.
The Columbus goalie just picked up where he left off Sunday on his home ice, where he made 38 saves to help secure a 4-2 win over the Rangers.
