NHL Playoffs 2012: Have the NY Rangers Asked Too Much of Henrik Lundqvist?

On Wednesday night, for the first time in the 2012 Stanley Cup playoffs, New York Rangers goaltender Henrik Lundqvist authorized four opposing goals in a single game. He coupled that with a single-game save percentage of .750, his worst in a combined 81 regular season and playoff outings to date.

Was it a fluke? Nothing to worry about? Easy to forget and recover?

Not necessarily. Not at this point.

Recall that Lundqvist entered Wednesday’s action looking to rebound from another subpar shortcoming. He had repelled 26 out of 29 New Jersey Devils shots in Game 4, finishing with a .897 save percentage and a 4-1 loss for his team.

Granted, instances of this nature have happened before in this playoff run but not quite to this unsettling effect.

Lundqvist brooked back-to-back losses in the first round versus Ottawa, but allowed a combined four goals in those two games and posted a save percentage above .900 both nights. He also posted sub-.900 success rates in back-to-back games versus Washington in the conference semifinals but still managed to win one of those matches.

Through five games in the conference finals against New Jersey, Lundqvist has either pitched a shutout or allowed three-plus goals and stopped less than 90 percent of opposing shots. Three of the latter cases have occurred within the last four contests.

With Wednesday night’s 5-3 final, the Rangers, who trail only the Western Conference champion Kings for the stingiest defense throughout these playoffs, saw their team’s goals-against average reach 2.00. They are in the middle of the 16-team pack in terms of offensive output with 2.16 goals per game.

And the more that Lundqvist and the Rangers stall to flaunt and reap rewards from their resiliency, the more urgent their need for resiliency grows.

In harrowing hindsight, too much demand for Lundqvist early on and too little in return could inevitably pave a too little, too late scenario as New York vies to force its third straight Game 7 on Friday.

In the regular season, 11 other NHL goalies appeared in more games and 10 accumulated more minutes than Lundqvist. Los Angeles’ Jonathan Quick was one of them and has yet to show signs of sputtering.

Then again, in the playoffs, the Kings have only required 14 games and a pair of single-overtime series clinchers to punch in their passport to the Cup final.

Conversely, Lundqvist has started and finished each of 19 games and will presumably scrape the paint for Game 6 at the Prudential Center. But when you factor in the four overtime games, including a triple-overtime marathon against Washington, Lundqvist has seen 1,190 minutes of playoff action, which falls 10 minutes short of the equivalent of 20 games.

None other than New Jersey counterpart Martin Brodeur is second behind Lundqvist in terms of playoff minutes, but he has played 161 minutes fewer. Quick has toiled for 232 fewer minutes over the last six weeks.

Rangers head coach John Tortorella made all the right choices when it came to distributing the workload in the regular season when Lundqvist saw action in 62 games and backup Martin Biron appeared in 21.

And one can safely conclude that Lundqvist is already this year’s Tim Thomas in one sense. He has the Vezina Trophy locked away.

But the prospect of a Stanley Cup, let alone a Conn Smythe Trophy, is slipping slowly out of the reach of Lundqvist’s overly sweaty fingers. That could have been a different story if, say, the Rangers strike force had tallied three or four more goals in their first two rounds with the eighth-seeded Senators and seventh-seeded Capitals.

The Rangers edged out Ottawa in seven games by a cumulative count of 14-12, then went the distance against Washington by a final tally of 15-13. And if you discount empty netters, each of New York’s first seven losses, including Game 2 of the New Jersey series, were decided by a single goal.

Lundqvist couldn’t have been asked to do much more in any of those shortcomings. His skating mates could patently have done more to force themselves and their backstopping backbone to labor less in the early rounds.

But because they didn’t, they have suddenly lost back-to-back bouts by an aggregate score of 9-4.

They have effectively sapped the “super” out of Lundqvist’s superhuman persona at the most inopportune time.