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 when, even after initially going down, the Blueshirts always had a veneer of control.
“I thought we played a really good 60 minutes,” Will Cuylle said after scoring his 12th goal of the season. “When they scored, we came right back. Just being relentless, not taking our foot off the gas.”
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.
“Our forecheck wasn’t good enough. Our breakouts, I don’t think, were good enough tonight,” Bo Horvat said. “They were getting on our [defensemen] hard, turning pucks over, creating their opportunities that way. We just have to do a better job breaking pucks out.”
There are no such worries for the Rangers.
Now winners of five of six games since the trade deadline, the Rangers forechecked all game long, got below the hash marks and frequently hemmed in an Islanders side that tried multiple defensive combinations, but never found one that worked.
The only bad news for the home side 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.
Meanwhile, the Islanders put forth yet another game in which their forwards and defense appeared disconnected — a hallmark of this losing streak — and were 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 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.
“They kinda took it to us and we definitely didn’t have enough pushback,” Horvat said. “In this stage of the season, we need to have a lot better push than that if we want to beat those guys.”
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 Ilya Sorokin — who let in five of the 31 shots he saw — is not going to single-handedly take the Islanders to the playoffs again.
“I just think it was relentless,” Jonny Brodzinski said. “There was a few times in the third period, a couple small breakdowns, but I think overall, it was a really good game.”
The Rangers had gone down on 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.
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 Ilya 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.
That proved to be the last moment in which the game appeared within reach for the Islanders.
“They played a great game,” Islanders coach Patrick Roy said. “They did what they had to do. And that’s why they’re first in our division.”
