Power Outage at the Garden

Michal Rozsival, welcome to a season of booing. Two boneheaded plays by the Czech defenseman while the Rangers were on the power play led to both Islanders goals, as the Blueshirts lost to their division rival, 2-1. That’s back-to-back devastating losses for the Rangers after a 10-2-1 start.

Remember when the Rangers dominated third periods? Yeah, I don’t either. They’re now becoming a nightmare for the team. After giving up five goals in five-plus minutes on Saturday, they did it again last night, coughing up two goals in 4:42. For two periods the Rangers outplayed and outshot the Islanders but couldn’t buy a goal. You have to give goalie Joey MacDonald some credit, but, come on, he’s not exactly Billy Smith out there. He’s not even Tommy Salo.

In the third, they should have skated the Islanders into the ground, but instead we saw Rozsival bumbling his way around at the point on the first Rangers power play, and Nate Thompson scoring a few seconds later. On the next power play, Rozsival was up to his old tricks, passing up a shot (as usual), forced a pass to Paul Mara that was broken up by Richard Park, who then skated down the ice and put the puck in the net. And there wasn’t a Ranger in sight to cover up for Rozsival’s mishaps. At this rate, the Rangers are going to give up more goals on the power play than they’re going to score. Something has to give. The personnel has to change. The strategy has to change. Or I have to change the channel.

It was a frustrating night all around for the Rangers. They outshot the Islanders, 36-19. But they also had a ton of missed shots and blocked shots. They ran the Islanders ragged in the second, but just couldn’t put the puck in the net. Nigel Dawes and Petr Prucha worked hard but remain the poster boys for scoring inefficiency. Remember Aaron Voros? Brandon Dubinsky? Chris Drury? Scott Gomez? Someday they’ll score again. Markus Naslund finally put the Rangers on the board with 1:41 left in the game, but it was too little, too late. And whatever happened to all the hard work from the first few weeks of the season? And where’s the hitting? They were outhit by the Fishsticks, 27-19.

This one goes in the bad loss category. And you have to blame the power play. They were 0 for 4 last night, and are now 10 for 74 (13.5%) for the year (27^th in the league). Will they have to commit an off-setting penalty every time they draw a man advantage just to avoid being on the power play? Let’s hope it doesn’t come down to that.

Next game: Thursday vs. Tampa Bay.