NHL Playoffs 2012: Is the New York Rangers' Stamina Running Out?

After his team raised the upper hand in the Eastern Conference finals on Monday with a 3-0 triumph, New York Rangers head coach John Tortorella wondered aloud why potential fatigue was deemed an issue.

According to the skipper, never mind the fact that the Blueshirts had played the maximum seven games in each of the first two rounds. And never mind the cumulative 60 minutes and 15 seconds of overtime that essentially meant New York played 15 games just to set a date with the Devils.

As Tortorella told the metropolitan hockey press corps on Monday, “I don’t know where you guys get all this stuff being tired…If we’re tired this time of the year, there’s something the matter. We still have a month to play. You might as well not even ask me questions about being tired.”

Whether or not Tortorella wants to see the sources behind the notion of his team wearing down, the final 10 minutes of Wednesday night’s Game 2 would make one.

Granted, New Jersey was forced to play from behind and ultimately surmount a 2-1 deficit to tie the series at a game apiece. And after spilling that lead, the Rangers took eight unanswered shots between David Clarkson’s go-ahead goal and the 9:58 mark of the third period.

But for the remainder of the game, the Blueshirts could not get to Brodeur. And after Dan Girardi was denied on the team’s final shot on net, they went through eight minutes and 55 seconds without so much as a wide or blocked attempt.

Finally, within the last 67 seconds of game time and with an extra attacker, Marc Staal and Michael Del Zotto each sent the puck wide of the cage and Brad Richards was blocked by Adam Henrique.

Too little, too late, to put it simply. Not even three New Jersey icings within the last 2:14, including two on consecutive plays in the final 35 seconds, could bring out the Blueshirt bloodhounds and their noses for the net.

And New York’s suddenly arid offense cannot be blamed solely on the fact that the leaned-on Marian Gaborik missed the majority of the third period.

In fact, the Rangers went on that aforementioned, eight-shot sugar rush in the wake of falling behind without Gaborik’s input. Their shooting drought was in progress and stayed in progress when he returned at the 11:05 mark for one of five third-period shifts.

So, how exactly did they taper off so quickly and so permanently?

Whoops. Guess that question falls into Tortorella’s forbidden zone.

A sizeable helping of credit is owed to the Devils, who revamped their physicality and reaped at least one point apiece from such key cogs as Clarkson, Henrique, Ilya Kovalchuk and Zach Parise.

With that being said, it was on the Rangers to elicit an equal or greater response, of which there was none to be seen after Martin Brodeur repelled their first eight bids to delete the 3-2 deficit.

As the series shuffles across the river for Game 3, at least one of the key questions is whether the final one-goal differential is indicative of the course the series is now taking. Or is that still off-limits in Tortorella’s book?

The silver lining for Blueshirt buffs is that Game 3 does not fall until Saturday afternoon, with the opening faceoff tentatively slated for 1 p.m.

That means roughly 62 hours separate the last horn at Madison Square Garden from the next puck-drop at the Prudential Center. And it means Tortorella’s pupils will have a full, two-day respite that they didn’t even have between their conference semifinal clincher against Washington and the opener of this series.

Whether he acknowledges it externally, internally or not at all, how much Tortorella’s team can recharge in this interim may be a make-or-break factor in what is now a best-of-five bout for the Prince of Wales Trophy.