NEW YORK \u2014 The New York Rangers season is, for all intents and purposes, over.<\/p>\n
It has been for a while now; this is not news, and this is certainly not the result of their 5-4 overtime loss to the Columbus Blue Jackets at Madison Square Garden on Monday night.<\/p>\n
The Original Six franchise is now 17 points out of a playoff spot with 22 games left in their 2025-26 campaign, and the process of the group being slowly dismantled will likely continue en masse over the next several days as the trade deadline looms.<\/p>\n
You wouldn\u2019t know it, though, at least at times on Monday night. Every bit of it reared its ugly head over the first 40 minutes of the game, where the Blueshirts found themselves down 4-0 and seemed to be sleepwalking through yet another ugly loss.<\/p>\n
But the third? Where there was every reason to pack it in and call it a day given the score and where they are in the standings? They showed themselves something, showed head coach Mike Sullivan something in that his message is still resonating in the room despite every reason for him to have been tuned out over the last two months of the league\u2019s slate.<\/p>\n
Four straight goals to tie it up \u2014 Vladislav Gavrikov and Gabe Perreault scored twice in the period\u2019s first 54 seconds, while Will Borgen and Perreault eventually got it all square later in the final frame \u2014 put the \u201cNo Quit In New York\u201d mantra that hasn\u2019t felt real for much of the year into actual practice.<\/p>\n
It did not go unnoticed.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have reasons to just try and get home, say you\u2019re down 4-0 and feel sorry for yourselves,\u201d said veteran defenseman Adam Fox. \u201cBut, the start of the period was huge, being able to get one and then another real quick. I thought we got confidence, got momentum and played on top of them. Definitely proud of the group\u2019s effort in that third period.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sullivan, who is still fresh off leading Team USA to their gold medal but now finds himself back in a far more hopeless situation, echoed similar sentiments even if Kirill Marchenko\u2019s overtime tally just 64 seconds into the extra session squashed any hopes of completing the comeback.<\/p>\n
\u201cI admire our fight, that we stayed in and that we kept pushing,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s what we talked about in between periods, just trying to build on each shift.\u00a0 It helps when you score on that first shift, it gives you some juice. But, I really liked how we competed.\u00a0 It\u2019s a game of mistakes, every team makes them, but I thought we competed hard in the third to give ourselves a chance to get back in the game.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK \u2014 The New York Rangers season is, for all intents and purposes, over. It has been…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":483339,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5114],"tags":[191,5,4,43,5366,190,109,5222],"class_list":{"0":"post-483338","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-washington-capitals","8":"tag-capitals","9":"tag-hockey","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-sports","12":"tag-top-stories-trt","13":"tag-washington","14":"tag-washington-capitals","15":"tag-washingtoncapitals"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116167001071252804","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=483338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483338\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/483339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=483338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=483338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=483338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}