The goal horn had sounded. The red light had flashed behind Henrik Lundqvist. The Bruins, off a point shot by Dennis Seidenberg, seemingly had made it a 3-1 game at 10:01 of the third period.
But Seidenberg thought it all looked a little weird.
“When I shot it, I tried to get it past the first guy,’’ Seidenberg said. “I saw his pad on the short post. I didn’t really see any room for it to go in. I was kind of surprised when they showed it was a goal. But I didn’t expect it to be one.’’
Video replay confirmed what Seidenberg had feared. His shot had gone wide left and thudded into the padding around the goal, not into the net.
Nothing last night, after all, was beating Lundqvist. The Bruins sent 42 pucks on Lundqvist, including 18 in the third period. Lundqvist shooed them all aside to backstop the Rangers to a 3-0 win last night before 17,565 at TD Garden.
“We can be fooled by our shots for,’’ said Bruins coach Claude Julien. “I’m not saying we didn’t do anything right. We spent some time in their end. We had some good shots. We did some good things. I’m talking about overall. As a team game and as an identity of what we’re looking for, it wasn’t there.’’
The Rangers are the top team in the Eastern Conference, and perhaps the club to beat overall, for many reasons. Lundqvist is currently the lead dog for the Vezina Trophy as the league’s best goalie. Their defense, led by shutdown stud Dan Girardi (three hits, three blocked shots in a game-high 28:08 of ice time), doesn’t allow many quality chances. Up front, with captain Ryan Callahan pointing the way, the Rangers take advantage of mistakes and turn them into goals.
In short, the Rangers are playing the kind of game the Bruins once mastered. It is the type of game that has eluded the Bruins for too many weeks.
“We’re a checking team that scores. That’s our identity,’’ Julien said. “But right now we’re not checking and we’re not scoring. We’ve got to get back to checking. Checking is playing a lot harder, winning battles, and being really hard to score against. When you do that, teams get frustrated like we did tonight. We made a few mistakes and it ended up in our net. They beat us at our own game.’’
At 9:21 of the first, Zdeno Chara was called for delay of game. Julien didn’t see the play originally. But when he saw the replay, the coach acknowledged that Chara had picked up the puck.
