This isn’t the way anyone expects to see Artemi Panarin on the nightly highlight clips, but these are the playoffs and these are the 2024 Rangers.
So when the referees either didn’t see or didn’t want to call T.J. Oshie’s blatant high stick that caught Panarin across the face with 6:44 remaining in the second period, No. 10 did not cry. No. 10 did not whine. No. 10 did not look for someone else to come to the rescue.
Panarin took care of the matter, himself, he sure did, not by dangling, not by putting the puck through a defenseman’s legs on a toe-drag, but by swooping in and leveling Oshie up high in open ice 6:47 into the third period, possibly catching the winger in the head with an elbow.
Oshie was sent to the room to be checked by the league’s concussion spotter. After a review of the play, Panarin was not penalized at all. It was as if he suddenly became Tom Wilson with a Get Out of Jail Free card except he was the 2024 playoffs Panarin.
The battle was joined in Tuesday’s Game 2 at the Garden in which the Blueshirts got the job done by defeating the Caps 4-3 in a game that was played at a much higher pace in a much more intense environment than Sunday’s Game 1. The victory in this contentious one from start to finish gave the Rangers a 2-0 edge in the series that picks up in D.C. on Friday.
Pretty did not enter this one unless you want to cite Jack Roslovic’s pretty power-play snipe and K’Andre Miller’s pretty shorthanded goal as a trailer. And while there was more open ice in this one than in the opener, the game was decided in the corners, in the front and along the boards. The game was decided in those desperate moments when the puck was 50-50.
The game was ultimately decided for good in the last minute when the Rangers were pinned in their own end defending five-on-six after the Caps had pulled their goaltender. A shot by Jimmy Vesey had gone wide, the puck was back in the New York end after an icing, and it never left, moving seemingly inches at a time as if a rugby scrum had broken out in front of Igor Shesterkin.
“It was ugly a lot of the time, obviously there are some good plays out there that were made but for the most part it was mucky, chip it out, chip it in and more of a grinding game,” Jacob Trouba said. “It seemed it had more of a playoff feel.”
The Rangers became a more difficult team to play against as the season evolved. The midseason recalls of Matt Rempe and Adam Edstrom played a large part in that. They began to play with more of an attitude. That’s how they played in this one.
There was some skill. Mika Zibanejad scored a power-play goal and set up Miller’s shorthanded goal that proved the winner at 16:52 of the second after stripping Alex Ovechkin in the neutral zone. But this wasn’t a night on which the skilled Blueshirts could play tic-tac-toe. They won in tight spaces. Almost as if they practice these things every day.
“I think we’ve proven it to ourselves all year for the most part that we can play in these games,” Trouba said. “We’ve played in ugly games, we’ve come back in third periods, we come in and not be overly excited about a win because we know we didn’t play our best hockey, but none of that matters right now.
“Right now the only thing that matters is wins. You turn the page and move onto the next game and you take a little from it that you could win an ugly, dirty game, but we’ve already built up that confidence during the regular season.”
Trouba has been dropped in the order to the third pair with Erik Gustafsson while Braden Schneider moved up to the second tandem on Miller’s right with Adam Fox and Ryan Lindgren remaining intact. It is not quite clear which would be considered the matchup pair.
But in this one, with the Rangers clinging to this one-goal lead, head coach Peter Laviolette went with his penalty-kill pair of Trouba and Lindgren. They managed to survive this one with Trouba playing playoff hockey, with Lindgren playing playoff hockey…with Panarin playing playoff hockey.
Someone suggested to Trouba that the Rangers would need to win a number of games like this in order to reach the promised land of the Canyon of Heroes.
“Sixteen,” the captain said.
