David Quinn picks up first Rangers win, but it wasn\u2019t pretty

Of course David Quinn was concerned with the way this one went. But he was much more concerned with how it ended.

The Rangers’ first-year coach picked up his first NHL win, a 3-2 overtime victory Thursday night over the Sharks at the Garden that was as sweet for him as it was ugly to watch. That is, until Brady Skjei won it 37 seconds into the three-on-three extra period and kept Quinn’s Rangers from tying the franchise’s worst start in 20 years.

“It’s about winning. You’ve got to win,” Quinn said. “It’s a get-it-done profession. … Obviously a lot has been made of the situation we’re in, from a rebuild situation. But you want to win hockey games. Tonight feels good.”

It only feels good because the Rangers (1-3-0) avoided the infamy of joining the 1998-99 club that started 0-4. It feels good because they had a pretty terrible opening 40 minutes, during which they constantly made poor decisions with and without the puck, and the electric Sharks (2-2-1) were only held at bay by goalie Henrik Lundqvist, who stopped 41-of-43 shots. It feels good because 20-year-old rookie center Brett Howden scored another goal and was the Rangers’ best skater all night.

And it felt really good when defenseman Brendan Smith tied it with 2:39 remaining in regulation, followed by Skjei firing one over the shoulder of San Jose goalie Aaron Dell in overtime to hand Quinn the thing he wanted most — a win as the coach of the New York Rangers.

“The players made me [realize the moment] when they brought me in the locker room and gave me the puck,” Quinn said. “It was pretty special. I wish I could divide the puck into about 45 pieces, because it was a great win for us. We needed to feel good about tonight. We needed to feel good about something.”

The fact is, if the Rangers want to get Quinn any more of these, they can’t keep playing a style he described as “reckless.” The defensemen were constantly pinching at inopportune times, and the forwards were hardly backing them up. It resulted in the Sharks getting a plethora of odd-man rushes, including the one that Joonas Donskoi converted at 4:59 of the second period to give his team a 2-1 lead.

Somehow the Rangers were able to tighten things up in the third period, which allowed Smith to finish a Pavel Buchnevich centering feed from behind the net and tie the game.

“I don’t know if we deserve it, but sometimes you just have to find a way,” said Lundqvist, who had little chance on Marcus Sorensen’s terrific shorthanded goal that gave San Jose a 1-0 lead just 4:31 into the first. “I think that’s sometimes more important than playing well.”

What’s being made clear on a nightly basis is management made the right decision concerning Howden, who extended his points streak to three games when he scored on a blind backhand, through his legs and then through the legs of Dell, which tied the game 1-1 at 13:52 of the first. Even more prescient seems to be Quinn’s decision to give him a shot in the top six, skating alongside Chris Kreider and Mats Zuccarello — or should it be said he carried them all night?

“I think it’s just confidence, that’s a big thing,” said Howden, who came over from the Lightning at last season’s deadline as the key piece in the trade that sent Ryan McDonagh and J.T. Miller to Tampa Bay. “As you gain confidence, you feel like a different player. You feel way more comfortable in yourself out there. I just think over the games, I’ve gained some more confidence.”

The hope now for Quinn’s Rangers is that they can gain confidence from their first win, no matter how it looked for most of the night.

“We needed to feel good about ourselves,” Quinn said, “so let’s see how we handle it.”