Sometimes, there is more pressure facing a downtrodden opponent like the Buffalo Sabres than there is in going up against the top teams in the league.
The Sabres came into Madison Square Garden Monday a team in utter disarray: Their best player Jack Eichel, is out indefinitely with an upper body injury; their No. 1 goalie, has been out since late February with a lower body injury, and their coach, Ralph Krueger, was fired after the Sabres just couldn’t stop losing.
A team like the Rangers, playing its fourth game without its head coach, David Quinn, who remains out per the NHL’s COVID-19 protocol, and hoping to hang on in the East Division playoff race, simply cannot afford to drop points to a team like Buffalo, which entered the Garden having gone 0-11-2 in its last 13 games.
Chris Kreider’s second power play goal of the game, and Kaapo Kakko’s second goal of the game, into an empty net, saved the Rangers from that nightmare scenario, as the Blueshirts’ broke out of a third-period tie and pulled away from the lowly Sabres, winning, 5-3 before a lively 1,800 in the Garden.
The Rangers had entered the third period with a 3-1 lead, but two goals early in the period, by rookie Dylan Cozens and Jeff Skinner, had tied it for the Sabres. But Buffalo’s Casey Mittelstadt got sent off for a high sticking penalty, against Julien Gauthier, at 4:57, and the Rangers made the Sabres pay on the power play. Ryan Strome took a shot that was stopped by Buffalo relief netminder Dustin Tokarski, and Kreider swept in the rebound at 5:47, for his team-leading 16th goal of the season.
The Sabres, who last won on Feb. 23 against the Devils, took the lead at 3:52 of the second period, when Rasmus Asplund jammed one in at the near post for his second goal of the season. But Kakko, who had gone 19 games without a goal, scored his first goal since Game 4 of the season, Jan. 22 in Pittsburgh, to tie it at 7:13.
Kakko, 20, had started the game on the Kid Line, with 19-year-old Alexis Lafreniere and 21-year-old Filip Chytil, but acting coach Kris Knoblauch decided to move him up to the second line, with Artemi Panarin (three assists) and Strome (two assists), and the move paid immediate dividends. On an offensive zone faceoff, to the left of Tokarski, Panarin stole the puck from Buffalo defenseman Jacob Bryson, went around behind the net, came out the other side and centered for Kakko, all alone in the slot.
Kakko’s first attempt was stopped by Tokarski’s left pad, but the young Finn whacked at the puck a second time and popped it up over Tokarski and in for his third goal of the season.
Tokarski, a former Hartford Wolf Pack goalie who last played in the NHL in 2016, had just been promoted from the Sabres’ taxi squad after Buffalo traded Jonas Johansson to Colorado on Saturday. With regular goaltender Linus Ullmark injured, Tokarski was serving as backup to Carter Hutton but was forced to come on when Hutton left the game following a collision with Julien Gauthier.
The Rangers took the lead when Kreider scored his first goal, on a five-on-three power play at 10:39, banging in a feed from Panarin from the slot. They extended it to 3-1 when Adam Fox, playing in his 100th NHL game for the Rangers, jammed in the rebound of a shot by Mika Zibanejad shot at 18:18 of the second. The Rangers seemed well on their way to a comfortable victory then.
But Buffalo stunned them with two early goals in the third period, Cozens snapping a shot over goalie Keith Kinkaid’s stick-hand shoulder at 1:09, and Skinner caught the Rangers in a line change and beat Kinkaid with a wrist shot on a breakaway at 4:22 to tie the score at 3-3.
