By virtue of their schedule, the Rangers and Henrik Lundqvist were afforded the opportunity to find their game, both collectively and individually. The stretch of 10 wins in 12 games that ended with Tuesday’s wild 5-4 loss to the Panthers were games all started by Lundqvist, and any early-season rumblings about the 35-year-old netminder being close to the end of his career were quieted with authority.
But Lundqvist was far from his sharpest Tuesday. Even if there were a couple of difficult bounces, he still allowed three goals on six shots — two of them short side — which led to calling on Ondrej Pavelec for relief just 16:47 into the first period.
And here is where things will get tricky: This was just the sixth game all season for Pavelec, the Rangers’ first-year understudy trying to get his career back on track. The most recent of his three starts was Oct. 28 in Montreal. So it’s hard to really judge his future value to the team, or how indicative his .889 save percentage and 3.56 goals-against average are of his current form.
But it’s easy to know that the Rangers are going to need him, and he knows it.
“I knew it’s going to be my role,” Pavelec told The Post after Tuesday’s game. “There’s no excuses. You’ve got the guys that they don’t play for a while, then they jump in and the coach expects them to play well. That’s the way it is and that’s the way it should be.”
Certainly that is the way Alain Vigneault is thinking, having spent his first four years on Broadway with the luxury of two backups who went on to become starters elsewhere. First was Cam Talbot, who went 33-15-5 during his two years here before getting traded to Edmonton.
Then came Antti Raanta, who went 27-14-4 in the previous two years before being traded to Arizona at this summer’s draft.
“When you look at our winning percentages of our backups since I’ve been here,” Vigneault pointed out this month, “they’re very high.”
There is a time coming when Pavelec is going to get his chance to show if he’s the next in this line of succession. guided by renowned goaltending coach (or whisperer) Benoit Allaire.
The team had a day off on Wednesday before returning to practice on Thursday in anticipation of Friday’s Garden match against the Hurricanes. After that, it’s another three days without a game before Tuesday’s contest in Pittsburgh, and then another two days off before playing in Washington on Friday.
At least Friday and Tuesday make sense as starts for Lundqvist, which would raise his consecutive streak to 15 games — still short of his all-time longest consecutive-starts streak of 26 in 2011. But that Capitals game is the end of the cushy road, followed the next night by a Garden match against the first-place Devils. It’s the team’s first back-to-back since Oct. 13-14.
That makes it 21 games in 53 days from Oct. 15 through Dec. 7, with 14 of those games at home. From Dec. 8 through Jan. 7, they play 15 games in 30 days, with two back-to-backs and seven road games (eight if you include the Winter Classic at Citi Field).
That is a lot different, and not just for the goalies. The Rangers have dealt with very few injuries, and have been afforded the time to let captain Ryan McDonagh properly heal from his abdominal strain, keeping him out for four games as he eyes a return on Friday. The ambiguous “upper-body injury” that made first-line center Mika Zibanejad a very late scratch Tuesday isn’t exactly heartening, and neither was the look of defenseman Brendan Smith as he was hardly able to get to the bench after he blocked a monster shot from Mark Pysyk just before the Panthers scored the game-winning goal late in the third period.
But that’s all part of a season. And so is eventually needing the backup goalie to win games, which is going to have to happen sooner or later.
“You have to find a way to stay sharp,” Pavelec said. “We were winning the games, Hank played great. We didn’t have back-to-back games. That’s just the way it is. You have to find the way in the practice, how to practice, to be ready when they tell you to play.”