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The first month of the Peter Laviolette era ended with the New York Rangers completing their first unbeaten five-game road trip in team history.
Off to a strong start under their new coach, the Rangers seek a sixth straight win Thursday night when they host the Carolina Hurricanes.
The Rangers are playing their third home game this season and first since looking flat and getting outplayed in a 4-1 loss to the Nashville Predators two weeks ago.
The response to the lackluster effort was winning the first three games in Seattle, Calgary and Edmonton by a combined 10-2 margin before getting overtime wins in Vancouver and Winnipeg.
New York’s strong road trip gave it a 7-2-0 record through Laviolette’s first nine games behind the bench. It is the first time the Rangers began a season with seven wins through their first nine games since 2009-10, a year they wound up missing the playoffs by one point.
“It’s awesome,” Laviolette said. “Any time you can grab a record like that, I think it’s pretty special. This franchise has been around for a long time, and so that’s a pretty big record. The fact that we were able to take on five games and push through them with wins, it’s exciting.”
The Rangers followed up Saturday’s 4-3 overtime win in Vancouver that was decided on K’Andre Miller’s game-winner with a 3-2 victory in Winnipeg. Mika Zibanejad scored the game-winning goal late in the extra period after getting his first goal of the season in Vancouver.
Artemi Panarin set up Zibanejad’s game-winner to cap a three-point night and is off to a flying start. Panarin, who turned 32 on Monday, has five goals and 10 assists during a season-opening nine-game points streak that matched the fourth-longest streak in team history and the longest since Darren Turcotte had a point in the first 11 games of 1990-91.
“This game is the last game of the road trip. Especially when you’ve won four,” Zibanejad said. “It’s, I mean, you can say now when we won, everyone wants to go home. But we were determined to finish it off in the right way, and I thought we did.”
Carolina is hoping to continue recovering from its shaky 3-4-0 start. After being outscored 16-8 in a three-game losing streak, the Hurricanes are on a three-game winning streak by sandwiching 3-2 wins over Seattle and Philadelphia around a 3-0 blanking of San Jose.
The Hurricanes improved to 3-0 in one-goal games this season when they rallied in Philadelphia on Monday night. Michael Bunting scored the tying goal on a power play and Teuvo Teravainen followed up a hat trick against San Jose with the tiebreaking goal with 3:47 remaining.
“He’s coming up big and we need it, that’s for sure,” Carolina coach Rod Brind’Amour said of Teravainen, whose production dropped from 65 points to 37 last season. “We were sitting on our heels in the third and not playing very well at all. Then we get one chance and that right now is the guy you want with it on his stick. He’s finding a way to put it in the net right now, so that was huge.”
Carolina also was perfect on five penalty kills and has not allowed a power-play goal in eight opportunities after allowing eight goals in 19 chances in its previous four games.
The Rangers won three of four meetings last season and are 9-4-0 in the past 13 meetings. – Field Level Media