Henrik Lundqvist doesn’t want to hear excuses: ‘We\u2019re here to win’

The Rangers are trying to either build or maintain a winning culture through what almost certainly will be a lot of losing this season. The holdovers from the Era of Excellence Without a Cup II may be realistic, but they are also insistent. Take a rather important fellow named Henrik Lundqvist, for one.

Sunday night’s 4-1 defeat to the Flames at the Garden featured a second period that represented the club’s poorest 20 minutes since the third period of Game 3 in Raleigh, when the Candy Canes struck for four goals against a defensively disorganized squad. At the end of two on Sunday, the Blueshirts trailed 3-0.

But they responded with a stout third period, pressing the play, driving to the net, peppering Calgary backup David Rittich while outshooting the Flames 18-4 through the first 16 minutes before finishing the night with a 45-26 advantage. Alas, though the Rangers were focused on the one goal of overcoming the deficit, they could produce only one goal off a Mika Zibanejad power play drive and never were able to seriously threaten.

In other years, I’d surely have lambasted the team for its inferior middle period. Would have castigated the group for not playing the full 60 and found a player willing to vent about this kind of play would not be sufficient to win the Cup. Perhaps that player would have been Lundqvist.

But on this night when I approached Lundqvist after he had completed the formal portion of his post-game Q&A routine, I suggested that the third period had been pretty impressive. I found a silver lining in the fact that the team had stiffened rather than wilted after the second period. I was curious if the goaltender shared that opinion.

He did not.

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Instead, he responded by throwing that question right back at me. Lundqvist wanted to know why I would have expected the Rangers to collapse after the second period. My answer was about as weak as his team had been in the second period, explaining as I did that it had been the team’s worst period in weeks, the team was young, the team was…

What I did not quite say out loud to one of the great players in franchise history was that I expected it because his team is not very good, and that’s what those kinds of teams do.

But Lundqvist gleaned the implication. He shook his head. And that while, yes, he was encouraged by the third period push-back, he also expected it. Why wouldn’t he? He is a competitor on a team of competitors. And though he had said in training camp that the team should have realistic expectations, he was not about to turn cartwheels over the fact that the Rangers had tried in the third period instead of giving up.

Indeed, the King, who took a seat for the second time in nine games while Alex Georgiev got the call for Tuesday’s Garden match against the Panthers, seemed a bit exasperated.

“We’re good enough to win games; we are,” he said. “Other people might want to let us off the hook because of the rebuild or the third period or whatever, but we are not allowing ourselves off the hook. We’re here to win.”

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Twenty minutes or so before coach David Quinn was talking…

Talk about role reversal. Here I was, prepared to let the team off the hook, grading David Quinn’s first team by a curve as generous as the one Yankees’ general manager Brian Cashman used to give his first-year manager, Aaron Boone, “A’s across the board.”

The thing is, in starting 2-5-1, the Rangers have pretty much been as advertised. Without natural goal-scorers, they ranked 26th in offensive production at 2.25 GPG before meeting the struggling Puddy Tats. Defensively, they have played with far more structure than they did the last three years under Alain Vigneault. That was expected, too, given how Quinn ditched the hybrid man-on-man that way too often left the front of the net open. But the club lacks an elite puck mover, so the transition/breakout is not as crisp or productive as necessary to jump-start the attack. Hence, another reason for the offensive malaise.

Through it all, through what is not yet three weeks of play, the Rangers are attempting to fight through it. The veterans refuse to yield. Mika Zibanejad, also lukewarm in toasting Sunday’s third-period, said that, “We have to figure this out quickly, because we don’t want to fall too far back and be chasing all season.”

Spoken like another man uninterested in being graded on a curve.