BUFFALO — Standing in front of the Rangers banner, coach Alain Vigneault had a coy smile, like a dog who had found out how to open the pantry.
“We did find a way to win,” Vigneault said after his team’s desultory performance ended in a 4-2 victory over the Sabres on Tuesday night at First Niagara Center. “We had a real strong push in the second period. So we’ll stress the push in the second, we’ll stress the goaltending and the [penalty kill] — and you guys can stress the rest.”
Like finding a flower growing in a garbage dump, the main thing Vigneault should stress is his Rangers (39-22-6) found a way to get the two points. As he said: “In the first period, it would be hard to count the amount of turnovers we had.”
And it’s not exactly as if it stopped then.
By the 6:05 mark of the second period, the Rangers had chased Buffalo goalie Robin Lehner, who had given up three goals on 14 shots and dug a 3-0 hole for his young Sabres (27-32-9), playing the second leg of a back-to-back. In came former Islander Chad Johnson, and gone was the Rangers desire to play in the offensive zone.
“The first 30 minutes, we played a really good game, then we took our [foot] off the gas,” said goalie Antti Raanta, who made 34 saves in his third, and likely final, start during Henrik Lundqvist’s bout with neck spasms. “It was nice to come back from that Sunday game and take two points.”
Sunday was the wild 6-4 loss to the Islanders at the Garden, when the two teams combined for seven goals in the first period and Raanta gave up four of them.
“Those kind of periods, it’s once in 10 years,” Raanta said. “It was nice to come here and start the game again and get a couple of good saves in early and get yourself going again.”
The first period was a mess of hockey, and the Rangers managed to take a 1-0 lead when Derick Brassard got a power-play goal at 7:30. That came on a great outlet pass from Mats Zuccarello, who said Brassard “was too open. It was kind of too good to be true.” So it goes for the Sabres’ porous defense.
That was about the same feeling when Lehner opened his legs as Zuccarello came to the left post at 4:38 of the second, a blind toss at the net that found the five-hole and crawled over the line.
“I see the big opening and I’m just patient,” Zuccarello said sarcastically. “Panic shot, went in, and I’ll take it.”
After Jesper Fast had a shot from the top of the right circle beat Lehner’s blocker at 6:05 of the second, it seemed as if the Rangers were ready to take the rest of the night off. But Buffalo coach Dan Bylsma woke his group up with the goalie change, and the Sabres started taking advantage of the Rangers’ mistakes.
First the Blueshirts were caught up ice and a bounce off the side of the cage resulted in an odd-man rush the other way. It was led by the superlative Jack Eichel, who found Sam Reinhart for a nifty tip, cutting the lead to 3-1 at 10:12. Just under six minutes later, J.T. Miller made a bad neutral-zone read and Brian Gionta found Johan Larsson in front to make it 3-2.
But the Rangers are nothing if not resilient, and they clamped down in the third — including their formerly struggling penalty kill, which burned four minutes of Buffalo man-advantage time with seeming ease. Raanta made 19 saves in the final 20 minutes, and after Miller flipped one into the empty net, the Blueshirts somehow avoided consecutive losses for the first time since Dec. 18 and 20.
“Does it say anything about our team that we don’t lose two games in a row?” Vigneault said. “We got some good goaltending and some timely PK, so we’ll take that and move on.”