NEW YORK \u2014 The mood in the home dressing room at Madison Square Garden was different than usual on Tuesday night.<\/p>\n
For good reasons.<\/p>\n
Finally.<\/p>\n
After recently snapping a drought of over 100 days without a regulation home win, the New York Rangers did it again, putting together a 4-0 shutout victory over the hapless and hopeless Calgary Flames.<\/p>\n
It marked a 65th career shutout for 40-year-old backup netminder Jonathan Quick, which broke a tie with Blueshirts legend Henrik Lundqvist and now puts him one shy of Patrick Roy on the all-time list.<\/p>\n
But it also led to questions that were different than the usual in Manhattan this season, the struggles of trying to find the positives in bad result after bad result.\u00a0 For the first time in a long time, it felt fun in there again.<\/p>\n
An example?\u00a0 On Alexis Lafreniere\u2019s game-opening goal at the 17:27 mark of the first period, one which ultimately also turned out to be the game-winner, Adam Fox recorded the secondary assist, which went down as the 400th point in his NHL career.\u00a0 But, the primary helper on the back-door deflection tally belonged to Mika Zibanejad, which gave him the 800th point of his career.<\/p>\n
In a light moment in the back corner of the Rangers room, Zibanejad was asked who gets the puck.<\/p>\n
\u201cSeniority, I guess,\u201d Zibanejad said through a smile. \u201cThat was cool, I\u2019ve never had that happen before. We\u2019ll see who gets it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Perhaps they\u2019ll saw it in half. Perhaps someone will end up with a hat instead of a puck, as Lafreniere has plenty of extras.\u00a0 He recorded the second hat trick of his NHL career, and first three-goal performance at home, and seems to have found chemistry with linemates Zibanejad and Gabe Perreault, with the latter recording two primary assists on the night.<\/p>\n
The somewhat mercurial Lafreniere is on a hot stretch, now with nine points in his last five games, and that he\u2019s stepped up after the trade of Artemi Panarin hasn\u2019t gone unnoticed by his teammates.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been lucky enough to see him do that for a few years now,\u201d Quick said. \u201cHe\u2019s a special player with a ton of talent, and it\u2019s fun to watch him play hockey.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK \u2014 The mood in the home dressing room at Madison Square Garden was different than usual…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":498617,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[895,26,5294,896,5,4,43,5366],"class_list":{"0":"post-498616","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-calgary-flames","8":"tag-calgary","9":"tag-calgary-flames","10":"tag-calgaryflames","11":"tag-flames","12":"tag-hockey","13":"tag-nhl","14":"tag-sports","15":"tag-top-stories-trt"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116212397892054785","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498616","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=498616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498616\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/498617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=498616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=498616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=498616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}