Rangers answer David Quinn’s challenge by ripping Hurricanes

It’s not a good sign when the coach needs to rip into his team to get it to respond. But at least in those instances, seeing the team actually respond is far better than the alternative, even if it is against a familiar patsy.

And so two days after David Quinn’s diatribe killing the Rangers’ effort in an awful loss in Columbus, they came out and played a lot more assertive game while taking a 6-2 victory over the Hurricanes at the Garden on Tuesday night.

“I think he’s a very honest man, which is what you want in a coach,” defenseman Brady Skjei told The Post. “You want honesty, you want him to tell you how it is. There’s no beating around the bush, which is good. The message which he said to [the media] is very similar to the one he said to us. We needed to be more assertive, be stronger. And I think we had a really good response.”

Quinn was just about as mad as he has been all season following the 7-5 loss to the Blue Jackets on Sunday night, calling his team’s effort “just ridiculous” and “a joke” while it lost for the sixth time in seven games. But the Rangers (19-20-7) came out with a different mindset in this one, and they beat the Hurricanes (22-19-5) for the 16th straight time on Broadway, a streak dating to Jan. 5, 2011.

The Blueshirts mostly played hard in the corners. They didn’t always shy away from contact along the walls or in front of either net. They were able to exit their zone without too much trouble, and when they got going, they went fast in attacking a disjointed Carolina team and wobbly goalie Curtis McElhinney.

It resulted in two goals each from Mika Zibanejad, Pavel Buchnevich and Tony DeAngelo, while six other players picked up points, including three assists for Mats Zuccarello. It was also a 34-save performance for Henrik Lundqvist, who won his first game of the calendar year while starting for just the third time in the past seven games.

“Thank God we had a game this quickly after that one, get a chance to redeem ourselves,” said Zibanejad, now with 14 goals on the season. “We knew what we had to do. We talked about it. The way we play and the system we have, we didn’t really have that against Columbus. I thought we did a better job with that, and it showed.”

As necessary as it is to put this in the context of the most recent game because of the way Quinn had reacted, the coach himself was looking at the bigger picture. He still liked the way his team played in the three games leading up to that disaster against the Blue Jackets, which he wants to now consider the outlier of the group.

“I think we had played three good games before the debacle in Columbus,” Quinn said. “I think we built off that and moved past what happened in Columbus. Guys took ownership of it and righted a wrong.”

It started right away, when DeAngelo got his first of the night just 1:16 in on a long wrister. Saku Maenalanen tied it just over eight minutes later on his first of his two — and how often are there eight combined goals with four players each scoring twice?

But then the Rangers started to run away with it, Zibanejad getting his first on a great set play from Kevin Shattenkirk and Chris Kreider for a power-play goal at 12:41 of the first, followed up under two minutes later by Zibanejad finishing a great feed from behind by Zuccarello for a 3-1 lead.

Buchnevich then put in consecutive power-play goals at 3:41 of the second and 4:19 of the third to make it 5-1, which had sandwiched Lundqvist’s jaw-dropping pad save on Warren Foegele late in the second. Maenalanen and DeAngelo traded goals to complete the score sheet, and by then, the Rangers had seemingly put Columbus behind them.

“We had to respond,” Skjei said, “and I thought we had a really good response.”