That one's going to stick in the old craw for a bit, I think. It's taken me awhile to boil this down to a few coherent thoughts ... well, at least I think they're coherent. It might just be the ravings of a madman. You be the judge.
Mile high view of the game ... yeah, King Henry stood on his freaking head. Carolina out-chanced NYR so badly that it wasn't even worth counting anymore and the guy stopped upwards of five really strongly redirected shots in addition to a fair number of Grade A one on one looks. He was stupid good but he still should have lost that game given the sheer quantity of good chances he faced. It's a freaking miracle that one of his own guys didn't deflect in a Canes shot until 2 minutes to go in the 3rd, because they were almost recklessly throwing themselves in front of everything Carolina threw at the crease. There's being good and there's being lucky and Lundqvist managed to dial up a game when he was both. And the thing is still headed to OT if the Canes could get their heads out of their own butts in the defensive zone and don't barf up that third goal. I'm not sure what the heck Gardiner was even trying to do with Buchnevich coming out of the corner but it looked to me like he was so scared of taking another penalty that he just froze. Meantime he got no help from anybody else, largely because they all had dead legs from taking a lazy icing call just beforehand. That kind of crap is the difference between getting points out of that game and not, and it's happening WAY too often. There are going to be nights when the offense just can't find a goal and you need to rely on the D to grind out a point, and this D group is PLENTY good enough to make that happen ... especially against a team like the current Rangers. And ... nope. Just not happening right now.
Now, if you don't mind I'm never going think about that game ever again. There are actually some individual positives I'm tempted to point out, but nobody cares ... including me ... and it's better to let this one quietly fade from memory.