What should worry the Rangers after Wednesday night is not just the way they struggled to break down the Panthers’ defense and forecheck all night long.
What should worry them just as much is that Florida coach Paul Maurice did not feel like his team forechecked particularly well on a night when the Rangers got just 23 shots on Sergei Bobrovsky’s net and at one point went 14:23 without one in a 3-0 loss.
“That’s kinda the way we play,” Maurice said. “I thought we were just OK with it, to be honest with you.
“We gave up two breakaways, that’s a neutral-zone problem, cause there’s a guy alone skating with the puck straight through it. So we gotta fix that. I will tell you this: all of these games are so close. The score almost doesn’t tell you anything cause it’s a turn of a puck. It’s a puck that they blocked and we didn’t or a pass that we made and it’s two or three and that’s the difference. So in this building, they get one, they catch fire.”
The Rangers, however, never got one on Wednesday. And for the game’s first 53 or so minutes, they never really came close — mounting a push at the end that proved too little and too late, with Braden Schneider’s early breakaway accounting for perhaps the only grade-A chance to that point in the night.
The Panthers were more physical, setting a tone early with Matthew Tkachuk’s hit on Vincent Trocheck.
The Panthers forechecked more effectively than any team has against the Rangers this postseason. The Panthers cleared out the front of their net all night.
“We didn’t have enough [possession] time to really even establish a net-front presence,” Chris Kreider said. “I think there were a few times where, yeah, we did get there, did get a few pucks and bodies, but we didn’t do enough to give ourselves chances to be in the O-zone and even get to the net.”
Coming into this series, the line was that Florida would be similarly aggressive to the Hurricanes — a team the Rangers found ways to break down throughout the second round. That is true, but only to a point.
The Panthers were more controlled, more effective in their physicality and less susceptible to breakdowns, both on their forecheck and in-zone.
Their top line, headed by Selke winner Aleksander Barkov, barely put a foot wrong all night.
And the Rangers were at a loss as to how to attack them.
“I think it boils down to playing north-south hockey,” Kreider said. “Getting pucks behind lines, getting pucks in. That’s the kind of hockey that works this time of year. That’s the kind of hockey they played and we didn’t.”