#Rangers undone by another bad start

The Rangers didn’t get off to the kind of start they wanted to for the second time in the past three games.

Veteran Devils center Travis Zajac caught the Rangers sleeping just 32 seconds into Tuesday’s 4-3 loss at Madison Square Garden, when he put back a rebound for the early 1-0 lead. Chris Kreider, discombobulated, then took a tripping penalty at 1:02.

It was the second time this season the Rangers were penalized within a game’s first two minutes. Blueshirts defenseman Jack Johnson was called for holding 1:49 into the season-opening 4-0 loss to the Islanders on Thursday.

“The real story was the start of the game for us,” head coach David Quinn said on a Zoom call after the loss, which dropped the Rangers to 1-2. “I thought we started playing the last seven or eight minutes of the first. We started playing well, doing some good things, I thought we did some pretty good things in the second and the third, but not enough. You just can’t give up goals the way we did. The first goal is a bad change, we end up unfortunately giving up a breakaway, hit the pad and they go the other way. Their goals were too easy. Give them credit, they competed hard, they did a lot of good things.

“We played 48 minutes instead of 60. We’re not going to have a chance to win night in and night out if that’s how we’re going to do it.”

The Rangers didn’t register their first shot on goal until eight minutes into the first period, and their second one didn’t come until nearly 12 minutes in. By the end of the first 20 minutes, the Devils held a 10-7 shots on goal advantage as the Rangers finally began to get pucks to the net.

“One of the things we’ve got to continue to harp on and manage is the puck,” Quinn said. “I thought we turned it over too much through the neutral zone. We have to continue to understand the five-foot passes and puck support and how we’re going to play, it’ll allow us to have some speed. We’ve got to be ready from the drop of the puck.”

“It’s just disappointing that we started the way that we did. I did like how we recovered, I think we only had two shots in the first 12 minutes. And then all of a sudden we started playing with tempo. We weren’t soft offensively either, we were getting inside, we were shooting pucks.”

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Quinn successfully challenged for offside on what would’ve been the Devils’ fifth goal of the game, when a shot from P.K Subban at the top of the zone beat Alexandar Georgiev at 17:45 of the second period.

But the third-year Rangers coach said he also thought about challenging the goal that put the Devils up 4-2. Jack Hughes set up Miles Woods with four minutes left in the second, but he somewhat looked to engage in a kicking motion with his skate.

“Yeah we thought about it, I just didn’t think we were going to win that challenge,” Quinn said. “It’s something we looked at, but didn’t think we were going to win it.”

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Mika Zibanejad appeared to be shaken up on the bench late in the third period, but there was no update on the star center’s status following the game.