Thursday November 11, 2010 is a day that for Ranger fans ended when at 1:32 of OT Artem Anisimov put a shot from the slot over the glove hand of Jhonas Enroth to give the Rangers a 3-2 win in the Garden. Where it started on this site though was with a look at what the loss of Michal Rozsival for the next week would mean for the rest of defense. Luckily for the Rangers that loss was not glaring in the actual game this evening and hopefully it will remain that way for the next week while he rests his sore shoulder.
In previewing the game with the Sabres I discussed what I believed would be the lines for the evening and that the Rangers would have to continue to play the same style of grind it out hockey they did without Gaborik even with him back. For parts of the game this evening they did that and you will notice on each of their three goals it came off solid fore-checking, winning battles and getting tough goals while when they struggled to generate offense they played soft and on both goals given up they failed to take the body in front of the net.
All was quiet for a few hours until 5 when the typical announcement of the lineup happens and then it seemed that everything broke loose at once. There was the lineup and final lines which included the announcing of who would play with Gabby along with the somewhat surprising scratch of Boogard, dressing of White and mixing of other lines. Right around the same time came the news that Henrik Lundqvist showed up to the arena sick with the flu and would not go making Martin Biron the goalie for the evening.
Also dropping around the time of the lineup and goaltending news was the somewhat out of the blue trade that sent Dane Byers to Columbus for Chad Kolarik. I analyzed the deal in terms of losing Byers, the captain of the Wolfpack, from Byers perspective of getting out of the dysfunction of Hartford and going to an organization that might give him a more legitimate chance to play in the NHL. From the Ranger perspective I went through Kolarik’s history as well as the scouting report on him.
Finally we had the game and while it wasn’t always pretty as I said above for all the talk about Gaborik’s return it would be Anisimov who stole the show. Back at it tomorrow.
