NEW YORK _ Having to play a game after watching the members of the 1994 Stanley Cup championship team thrill the Madison Square Garden crowd by just walking on the ice to celebrate their title of 25 years ago couldn't have been easy for the present-day Rangers.
It no doubt helped that their opponents for the night, the Carolina Hurricanes, had lost 16 straight games in the building, dating to January of 2011, but the Hurricanes were in no mood to play patsy on this night, spoiling the Rangers' grand night with three third-period goals to register a 3-0 victory. Warren Foegele had the game-winner, with Andrei Svechnikov and Brock McGinn adding empty-netters to puff up the score. Petr Mrazek had 27 saves to earn the shutout for Carolina.
The loss dropped the Rangers to 23-23-8 overall, and to 1-2-1 on their five-game homestand, which ends Sunday, when John Tavares and the Toronto Maple Leafs come to town.
The Hurricanes (28-21-6) are fighting to get into the playoffs, and they seemed to be in an ornery mood for much of the game, with lots of pushing and shoving, gloved punches and plenty of heated words exchanged by the teams in the first two periods.
But neither team managed a goal in the first 40 minutes. Carolina hit one goalpost in each of the first two periods and the Rangers hit one in the second, and that was all the excitement until Foegele banged in a pass from Saku Maenalanen for his seventh goal of the season at 6:43.
The Rangers got a chance to tie the score late in the period, when Carolina's Jaccob Slavin was penalized for holding Pavel Buchnevich with 5:50 remaining, giving the Rangers their second power play of the game. But they failed to take advantage.
