Rangers top Kraken as backup goalie Jonathan Quick earns second straight shutout
SEATTLE – The Rangers started their longest road trip of the season Sunday without center Filip Chytil, who stayed behind in New York because of an upper-body injury.
But in a battle of backup goaltenders, with Jonathan Quick going up against the Kraken's Philipp Grubauer, the Rangers got more stellar goaltending from the 38-year-old Quick, who made 24 saves to post his second consecutive shutout and earn his 397th career victory in a 2-0 win at Climate Pledge Arena.
It was Quick's first back-to-back shutouts since 2011 with the Los Angeles Kings when he had three straight.
In a game where the Rangers (11-4-1) played fine defensively, but created little offensively in the first two periods, Quick, who improved to 4-0-0 and has allowed just four goals in four starts and one relief appearance, kept the Rangers in it until Lafreniere got free at the backdoor to tap in a shot/pass from Artemi Panarin for his seventh goal of the season at 17:30 of the second period.
Jones scored his first of the season, a bad-angle flip from the left circle that appeared to handcuff Grubauer and went off his glove arm and in, at 2:58 of the third, to make it 2-0.
The Rangers went 1-1 in two games at the Garden last week, losing to Winnipeg and beating San Jose, but coach Peter Laviolette said he’d been more pleased with the way the team played in the two games than with how they had played in the games that preceded them.
“There's a few games prior to the Winnipeg game that we didn't like,’’ the coach said at the Rangers’ morning skate Sunday. “But, you know… our losses are at four, and we're going for our 11th win. And so, things have gone well. We started the year the right way. We were playing well. And so there's always going to be spurts in there.’’
The Kraken (9-9-1) were playing the second night of a back-to-back, after beating the Islanders Saturday afternoon. But Laviolette said before the game he didn’t think the Rangers would have any advantage because the Kraken had played Saturday.
“We don't talk about that,’’ he said. “We need to be ready. We've got to make sure we're focused with our game, that we play hard inside of our game, we're doing the right things, and they'll be ready to play, whether they played yesterday or not.’’
Colin Stephenson covers the Rangers for Newsday. He has spent more than two decades covering the NHL and just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
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