Rangers must learn to overcome longtime playoff Achilles’ heel

Series leads have been the Rangers’ Achilles’ heel before. 

During the organization’s last reign of playoff success from 2012 to 2017, during which the Rangers qualified for the playoffs every year, made it to the conference final three times (2012, 2014, 2015) and to the Stanley Cup Final once (2014), the Rangers were 3-14 in games after taking a series lead. 

Who could forget the pair of 3-0 wins in Games 1 and 3 over the Devils in the 2012 conference final? Both were followed by tough losses, a 3-2 defeat and one by a 4-1 margin. How about the 3-2 overtime win against the Penguins in the series opener of the second round in the 2014 playoffs? The Rangers lost the next three by a combined score of 9-2, which included two shutouts, before they pushed it to seven games and ultimately advanced. 

The Rangers, of course, have zero rings to show for that stretch of consistent playoff berths. 

If this is the start of the Rangers’ next championship window, they’re going to have to learn how to compete while ahead in a series, maintain control of it and finish it off in order to do what the last championship-caliber squad couldn’t do — win the Cup. 

So here the Rangers were, facing a Game 5 on Thursday night in the Eastern Conference Final against the Lightning after blowing a 2-0 series lead in Tampa this week. It was their first lead in the playoffs so far after they went down 3-1 against the Penguins in Round 1, as well as down 2-0 and 3-2 against the Hurricanes in Round 2. 

While they may have not been able to build on their comfortable lead this time around against the defending champions, the Rangers have displayed the same sort of resiliency as those 2012-17 teams this postseason. Throughout that stretch, the Rangers were 15-6 in elimination games. 

The current Rangers are 5-0 in these playoffs when their season is on the line. 

That “No Quit in New York” mantra has been at the heart of this Rangers run, which has them as one of the final three teams in the Stanley Cup tournament. It’s an intangible that not every club possesses, but it’s also something that can’t be relied on all the time. 

Chasing in a series is almost always going to catch up to a team eventually. For the Rangers, giving this Lightning team any sort of advantage could be detrimental. They were opportunistic against a Tampa Bay team that had been away from game action for over a week in Games 1 and 2. 

So with home-ice advantage, the Rangers had to protect the Garden ice in order to meet the Avalanche in the Stanley Cup Final. 

“It wasn’t second- and third-chance opportunities in the first two home games, it was moving the puck east to west across the ice, getting the puck off your stick in less than a half a second,” Chris Kreider said. “I don’t care who is in net, every goalie in the world struggles with a puck that goes east-west, has to battle through traffic and then is immediately released on net. They can’t get set. That’s what gives us our best chance, and I think to a guy we probably all could say we received a pass like that [in Game 4] and got it, picked our head up, tried to pick a spot as opposed to getting it off quick.”