Rangers score 7 unanswered goals, beat Senators heading into All-Star break
OTTAWA, Ontario — Artemi Panarin had a goal and two assists, and the New York Rangers scored seven unanswered goals to beat the Ottawa Senators 7-2 on Saturday night.
Jonathan Quick made 29 saves to stop his five-game losing streak, and first-year Rangers coach Peter Laviolette tied Al Arbour for seventh place in NHL history with 782 career wins.
Alexis Lafreniere, Chris Kreider, Zac Jones, Jonny Brodzinski, Blake Wheeler and Kaapo Kakko also scored for the Rangers (30-16-3), who were coming off a 5-2 loss to Vegas at home Friday night.
New York improved to 9-0-0 in the second half of back-to-back games and heads into the All-Star break atop the Metropolitan Division.
Six players had multiple points for the Rangers.
"With playing last night, (facing) a rested team in their building, travel, short a few players, that's a big win," Laviolette said.
"The efforts in the second games have been like they (were) tonight. They've been on point. Their work ethic has been really good and we've been able to win in some tough situations."
Ottawa got off to a solid start with Brady Tkachuk and Jakob Chychrun scoring the first two goals, but then things quickly fell apart in the second period. Joonas Korpisalo was pulled after allowing four goals on 17 shots. Mads Sogaard gave up two goals on 11 shots.
The Senators (18-25-2) had been riding a five-game point streak (3-0-2) coming into the game.
A lackluster third period by the Senators had the sellout crowd heading for the exits early. Panarin added an empty-net goal and Kakko rounded out the scoring with a late goal.
"It is frustrating because I think we gave them the win," Ottawa interim coach Jacques Martin said. "We're in a good situation and you face a little bit of adversity, but you've got to build resistance to that and, you know, be able to stick with it. It seems like we lost our composure, we lost our compete level."
The second period started off well for the Senators, with Chychrun scoring a power-play goal at 1:24, but the Rangers responded with five straight goals in 11:03 to take a 5-2 lead.
Lafreniere began the outburst when the puck bounced off the back boards into Korpisalo and he grabbed the loose puck and tucked it in. Kreider tied the game with a shot from the top of the circle. Mika Zibanejad picked up his 500th point with the Rangers on the play.
The Rangers scored 39 seconds later when Jones took a cross-ice pass from Panarin, and they made it 4-2 on Brodzinksi's second of the season 2:04 later. That was the end of Korpisalo's night.
Just more then five minutes later, Zibanejad beat Thomas Chabot and dished a pass to Wheeler to beat Sogaard.
Tkachuk dropped the gloves with Connor Mackey after taking exception to a clean hit on Tim Stutzle and could only watch as his team gave up three goals.
The Senators opened the scoring with Claude Giroux finding Tkachuk for his 20th of the season. Giroux got his 700th career assist on the play.
"We need to learn from this," Giroux said. "We need to know that when that happens we need to react differently and get back on our toes and just play the way that we know works for us. We didn't do that tonight."
New York was missing two top-four defensemen in captain Jacob Trouba and injured Ryan Lindgren. Trouba served the first of a two-game suspension for elbowing Golden Knights forward Pavel Dorofeyev.
UP NEXT
Rangers: Return from the All-Star break to host Colorado on Feb. 5.
Senators: Host the Nashville Predators on Monday night.