New York Rangers head coach Peter Laviolette was left shaking his head after his team found itself on the wrong end of a one-sided affair.
Sure, the scoreboard showed only a two-goal defeat. However, the final score was not indicative of how his team fared en route to losing for the second time in three games.
The Rangers will look to clean up loose ends on Friday night when they host the Ottawa Senators.
“There’s definitely detail to defense, but defense is attitude,” Laviolette said after New York’s 5-3 setback to the Washington Capitals on Tuesday. “There’s a lot of compete that goes into defense and the battles that have to take place.
“For me, they’ve been off for a couple of games out of the last three. And I think any good team starts with good defense and the way that they defend and their purpose defensively. It leads to getting pucks out of your end, and it leads to playing offense. When you don’t play defense well, you end up spending too much time in your end.”
That was the fate of the Rangers, who were outshot 46-19 by the Capitals. Twenty giveaways did New York no favors, either.
There were bright spots for the Rangers, however.
Will Cuylle scored a goal in his second straight game and linemate Filip Chytil also tallied to boost his point total to five (three goals, two assists) in his last four contests.
Chris Kreider scored his sixth goal of the season to pull even with Artemi Panarin for the team lead. Panarin, however, saw his season-opening eight-game point streak (six goals, nine assists) come to a halt.
Panarin collected seven points (three goals, four assists) to help New York defeat Ottawa in two of the three meetings last season.
Former Vezina Trophy recipient Igor Shesterkin turned aside all 25 shots he faced in a 4-0 victory over the Senators on April 15, improving his career mark versus the club to 3-1-1 with a 1.98 goals-against average and a .933 save percentage.
Shesterkin could be put to the test against Ottawa, which has erupted for 34 goals over its last seven games (4-3-0). The Senators have bookended that stretch with eight-goal performances, with captain Brady Tkachuk, Tim Stutzle and since-demoted Adam Gaudette each tallying twice in a lopsided romp over the St. Louis Blues on Tuesday.
“We’re hard on ourselves and we want to make a difference every night, and some nights you have it, some nights you don’t,” Stutzle said, per the Ottawa Citizen. “But (Tuesday) was a do-or-die for us. We just worked hard.
“We try to do that every night, and sometimes the puck goes in for you, sometimes not, but I think (Tuesday) we were supporting each other well in all three zones and we didn’t give up a lot.”
Stutzle and Claude Giroux also set up a pair of goals, with the former extending his assist streak to a career-high five games while the latter pushed his point streak to seven games (five goals, six assists).
