NEW YORK _ Desperate to find a way to end their five-game losing streak, the Rangers did what they could to change things up Thursday as they prepared to host the red-hot Buffalo Sabres at Madison Square Garden. They changed up the forward lines, and they tried having a morning skate.
Whatever they did, it worked.
The new-look second and third lines produced, big time, with Ryan Strome getting his first two goals of the season, and Brett Howden getting a goal and an assist, and defenseman Tony DeAngelo scoring his third goal in two games as the Rangers (3-4-1) broke their losing streak and cooled off the Sabres with a 6-2 victory, their first win since Oct. 5, when they beat the Senators in Ottawa.
Rangers coach/mixologist David Quinn's latest experiment was to split up his top two forwards, Artemi Panarin and Mika Zibanejad, bumping left wing Chris Kreider and Kaapo Kakko up to the first line to play with Zibanejad and dropping Panarin down to the second line, with Strome and right wing Pavel Buchnevich.
The new second and third lines looked fabulous, and Panarin proved immediately he can create his own offense, when he scored the game's first goal, unassisted, at 11:41 of the first period. As Sabres defenseman Rasmus Dahlin mishandled the puck just outside the Buffalo blue line, Panarin poked it away from him, corralled it above the right circle, pulled it past goalie Carter Hutton's ill-advised poke check attempt, and slipped a backhander into the empty net for his fifth goal of the season.
Howden, dropped to third-line center after four games up on the second line, made it 2-0 at 14:32 when he whacked in a pass from Jesper Fast at the left post _ on his second attempt _ for his second goal of the season. Strome made it 3-0 in the final minute of the period when he tipped in left point shot by Brady Skjei 37.8 seconds before the horn for his first goal.
The only line that didn't look great was the first line, which didn't generate much offensively and happened to be on the ice for both of the goals Buffalo (8-2-1) would score in the second period. First, with the Rangers scrambling around in their own end, Kakko tried a blind, backhand clear that went right to Buffalo's Marco Scandella, who quickly fired a shot from the left point that got through a screen to beat Henrik Lundqvist and make it 3-1 at 4:17. Then, after a tremendous shift by the Panarin line _ in which Panarin hit the post on a one-timer _ DeAngelo scored his third goal in two games to put the Rangers up 4-1 at 13:20.
The three-goal lead didn't last all the way to intermission, as Buffalo's Vladimir Sobotka scored his first goal of the season with 49 seconds left in the period off another defensive breakdown. Skjei dropped his stick while making a strong defensive play in the neutral zone, but the Rangers were able to survive that and get the puck cleared. Skjei could have gone for a change, but didn't, and instead called for a new stick from the bench. He got it, and got back in position, but the whole episode seemed to create some confusion, and Sobotka ended up with the puck and fired a long shot past a flat-footed Jacob Trouba and Lundqvist to make it 4-2.
But in the third period, with the teams skating four-on-four, Howden and Strome combined on a big insurance goal that relieved any nervous tension the Garden fans may have felt, as the pair broke in on a two-on-one and Howden fed Strome for a backdoor tap-in to make it 5-2 at 7:57.
