WASHINGTON — Penalties have piled up for the Rangers in recent games, and it’s beginning to cost them greatly.
Aside from the win over the Bruins on Thursday, the Rangers have been charged with at least eight penalty minutes in each of the past eight games, including six straight with 10 or more.
Over that same span, they’ve had two contests with at least 20-plus minutes in the box.
Both the Rangers and Capitals took the same amount of penalties (4) in Washington’s 7-4 win on Saturday, but the home team capitalized on two of its power plays, while the visitors didn’t score any.
“Just got to honestly look at the penalties that we’re taking, see if there’s anything — if it’s the aggression, if it’s the reaching,” Mika Zibanejad said. “There’s always something that leads to the penalties. Definitely, that doesn’t help. I feel like that kind of comes and goes in waves, but that’s definitely something that will benefit and help us if we stay out of our zone.”
On the Capitals’ second stretch with the man advantage, after Brett Berard sat in the box for holding, Washington wreaked havoc around Rangers goalie Jonathan Quick before Dylan Strome buried a rebound to knot the game at one-all at the end of the first period.
Quick was furious and immediately voiced it to the refs, presumably because of all the traffic in and around the crease or Alex Ovechkin getting tangled up with Quick’s stick leading up to the goal.
Additionally, just 13 seconds after Sam Carrick pulled the Rangers within one, 3-2, in the second period, Ryan Lindgren was called for a delay of game for flipping the puck over the glass.
Forward Connor McMichael scored on the Capitals’ subsequent power play.
Washington ultimately went 2-for-4 with the man advantage on Saturday while fending off all four of the Rangers’ opportunities.
When the Rangers trailed 3-1 in the second period, Will Cuylle banged home a feed from Filip Chytil from behind the net.
After taking a timeout to further assess the goal, however, the Capitals successfully challenged for offside. The review took quite some time, but it was determined that the play was offside.
“It’s too many this year for us,” Chytil said. “Like for our line, it’s already the third or fourth goal which they take away from us and it’s like three goals from [Cuylle] that they take away from him. Of course, it’s not helping to you, even the team. You could go 3-2 and you could be close. Another small thing, another close challenge takes it away. But then we just forget about it and we were hungry to score a goal, and we did [score] one, we could score more. But how I said, it’s behind us today and we come to the rink tomorrow and try to be better than today.”
The Rangers got a fortuitous break seven minutes into Saturday’s game when Capitals goalie Logan Thompson flubbed a clearing attempt right to Chris Kreider, who shot it back into an empty net from long range to take a 1-0 lead.
The goal was Kreider’s 13th of the season.
Quick stopped 21 of the 27 shots he faced in the loss.
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