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The Rangers spent most of the past month and a half playing on their home ice and continuing their push towards the playoffs.
Now they’ll have to take the show on the road for their last extended trip of the season, playing in four cities across seven days, with three of the games against fellow postseason contenders and another against a team still in the hunt.
The challenging stretch begins Sunday in Winnipeg, followed by showdowns at the Wild, Blues and Stars before they return home. While the Jets are currently on the outside looking in, if the regular season had ended Saturday, the Wild, Blues and Stars would all be in the playoffs in the Western Conference.
“It’s important,” said defenseman Jacob Trouba, who will be playing against his old team Sunday. “Obviously we want to have a good road trip. It’ll be nice to spend some time on the road, be around each other, be with each other, go out to some dinners. To spend some good time together, I think that’s something — we’ve been kind of local for the most part, I guess, playing games. So it’ll be nice to get on a road trip and spend some time together.”
The Rangers may owe a few dinners to goalie Igor Shesterkin, who has often put the team on his back to pull out wins, and did so again Friday in a 3-1 victory over the Devils.
Shesterkin’s dominant presence in net has helped the Rangers feel more comfortable in the kind of close, low-scoring games that will be critical down the stretch and into the playoffs. While the team has gone through some offensive lulls, especially coming out of the All-Star break — scoring 20 goals in eight games — it has largely been able to hold on to late leads thanks to their third-year goalie.
“Early on we were struggling with those leads,” Mika Zibanejad said. “We needed a few [wins] to get that confidence. Obviously it helps a lot having him back there. We try to do everything we can to not leave him all by himself in the last five minutes of the game. But it definitely makes it easier with him back there.”
Friday, the Rangers took a 2-1 lead into the third period before Chris Kreider gave them some breathing room with an insurance goal midway through the period. Not that coach Gerard Gallant was feeling as comfortable as he had in some of the Rangers’ other close games of late.
“Not on the bench I don’t,” Gallant said when asked if he saw his team looking more comfortable in these low-scoring games. “When I get home and watch it I’ll probably say yeah. But it didn’t feel that way tonight. It wasn’t the same feeling as the Washington game and the Pittsburgh game, even though we lost that. We’re going to have some games like that, but I thought we could have been a lot better.”
Still, thanks to Shesterkin’s 32-save performance, the Rangers won for the 10th time in their past 16 games since coming back from their last extended road trip.
Now, another stretch of road tests awaits.
“I feel like we’ve been playing really well,” Zibanejad said. “Playing like we’ve been talking about all year. There were moments in the game where they get some momentum and we could probably do a little bit of a better job to eliminate that time of their momentum swing. Overall, I thought we’ve been doing what we need to do to get the wins. That’s been a good thing for us.”
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