WASHINGTON — Penalties have piled up for the Rangers in current video games, and it’s starting to value them tremendously.
Except for the win over the Bruins on Thursday, the Rangers have been charged with at the very least eight penalty minutes in every of the previous eight video games, together with six straight with 10 or extra.
Over that very same span, they’ve had two contests with at the very least 20-plus minutes within the field.
Each the Rangers and Capitals took the identical quantity of penalties (4) in Washington’s 7-4 win on Saturday, however the house crew capitalized on two of its energy performs, whereas the guests didn’t rating any.
“Just got to honestly look at the penalties that we’re taking, see if there’s anything — if it’s the aggression, if it’s the reaching,” Mika Zibanejad stated. “There’s always something that leads to the penalties. Definitely, that doesn’t help. I feel like that kind of comes and goes in waves, but that’s definitely something that will benefit and help us if we stay out of our zone.”
On the Capitals’ second stretch with the person benefit, after Brett Berard sat within the field for holding, Washington wreaked havoc round Rangers goalie Jonathan Fast earlier than Dylan Strome buried a rebound to knot the sport at one-all on the finish of the primary interval.
Fast was livid and instantly voiced it to the refs, presumably due to all of the site visitors in and across the crease or Alex Ovechkin getting twisted up with Fast’s stick main as much as the objective.
Moreover, simply 13 seconds after Sam Carrick pulled the Rangers inside one, 3-2, within the second interval, Ryan Lindgren was known as for a delay of sport for flipping the puck over the glass.
Ahead Connor McMichael scored on the Capitals’ subsequent energy play.
Washington finally went 2-for-4 with the person benefit on Saturday whereas keeping off all 4 of the Rangers’ alternatives.
When the Rangers trailed 3-1 within the second interval, Will Cuylle banged house a feed from Filip Chytil from behind the online.
After taking a timeout to additional assess the objective, nevertheless, the Capitals efficiently challenged for offside. The assessment took fairly a while, however it was decided that the play was offside.
“It’s too many this year for us,” Chytil stated. “Like for our line, it’s already the third or fourth goal which they take away from us and it’s like three goals from [Cuylle] that they take away from him. Of course, it’s not helping to you, even the team. You could go 3-2 and you could be close. Another small thing, another close challenge takes it away. But then we just forget about it and we were hungry to score a goal, and we did [score] one, we could score more. But how I said, it’s behind us today and we come to the rink tomorrow and try to be better than today.”
The Rangers received a fortuitous break seven minutes into Saturday’s sport when Capitals goalie Logan Thompson flubbed a clearing try proper to Chris Kreider, who shot it again into an empty web from lengthy vary to take a 1-0 lead.
The objective was Kreider’s thirteenth of the season.
Fast stopped 21 of the 27 pictures he confronted within the loss.
