Bounce-back win shows what Rangers took from recent slide

Maybe the best thing the Rangers have going for them is their self-awareness.

These Blueshirts are not fooling themselves or anyone else by thinking they have more talent than most of their opponents. They’re not fooling themselves thinking they can win by scoring four or five highlight-reel goals per game.

Instead, they are intently focused on how hard they work on a nightly basis, knowing that is the biggest component to having a chance for success. That hard work for most of the game is what brought them a 4-2 victory over the Senators on Monday night at the Garden, shaking off a rough Thanksgiving weekend that featured a two-game losing streak.

“We talked about it the room — we just have to realize what we are and what we need to do to have success,” Henrik Lundqvist said after a sterling 29-save performance. “There’s no in-between here. There’s no relying on this and that. It starts with hard work and paying attention to the little details in the game.

“When we do that, we can beat anybody. But if we don’t, we can lose against anybody.”

The first part of that statement was proven when the Rangers (13-10-2) went on a run of 9-1-1 preceding the little holiday backtrack. The second part was also proven when they got clobbered in Philadelphia on Friday, as desultory a loss as they’ve had under first-year head coach David Quinn.

But just as Quinn has preached individual accountability, he has also preached the ability for good teams to come back from bad losses. They might have lost again Saturday to the Capitals, but it was better. And against Ottawa (9-12-3), a team that is third in scoring and last in defense, the Ranges were able to play about 50 minutes of tight hockey, the 10 minutes of bad saved by Lundqvist, with sprinkles of opportunistic offense.

“I thought we were pretty brutal in Philly, thought we played well against Wash — score didn’t really indicate how we felt as a team,” said Kevin Hayes, who played another effective game while picking up his 12th assist. “You want to win every night, you don’t want to lose two, you don’t want a snowball effect.”

It almost snowballed out of their hands in the third period, when a 3-1 lead turned into 3-2 by way of the Rangers’ bugaboo — a six-on-five goal against, this one Mark Stone’s second of the night with 2:43 remaining in regulation. But Mika Zibanejad was able to get his eighth of the season into the empty Ottawa net with 1:39 left, giving his team a much-needed, and much-deserved, win.

“One of the things we talked about between the second and third was that the team that played the most honest hockey was going to win the hockey game,” Quinn said, “because I don’t think there was a lot of honest hockey from us for the first two periods.”

Going into the third period, the score was tied 1-1, with Marc Staal’s first goal since Oct. 7, 2017, offset the first from Stone. But the Rangers immediately took control in the third, with the first goal of the season from rookie Lias Andersson coming at 3:26 when he crashed the net and got one off his backside, followed by Chris Kreider’s team-leading 13th of the season when he finished a terrific Filip Chytil pass on a two-on-one rush to make it 3-1 at 8:18.

“We were leaving this locker room going out for the third saying that it’s 1-1 and we haven’t played nearly how we can play,” Hayes said. “I thought in the third we stuck it to them a little bit. We got two quick goals there, and it’s a lot nicer playing with the lead.”

What’s best for the Rangers going into the second leg of this home-and-home in Ottawa on Thursday night is that they know exactly what they need to do to have success — and it isn’t complicated.

“We can’t rely on just a few guys,” Lundqvist said. “We win as a group here. That’s the only way for us this year.”