Rangers escape with uninspiring win over last-place Penguins as NHL trade deadline looms

PITTSBURGH — The cliché “a win is a win” almost always applies, but it doesn’t feel right for the Rangers.

Not for a team that gave up eight goals in an embarrassing loss on the first night of a back-to-back slate, only to follow it up with a slow-starting, empty-net abetted 5-3 win over the Penguins that they were more than lucky to come away with after getting outshot 39-15 Sunday evening at PPG Paints Arena.

The cliché “beggars can’t be choosers,” on the other hand, certainly does apply to this Blueshirts team.

“We need to win games right now first and foremost, which we did tonight, but that’s not a recipe for winning games,” Ryan Lindgren said. “We’ve got another big one on Tuesday [against the Islanders], a team we’re battling with in the standings right now. We have to play a heck of a lot better, for sure.”

Splitting their first two games after the 4 Nations Face-Off break should hardly matter to the Rangers hierarchy that watched the team get destroyed in Buffalo and barely escape Pittsburgh with a win over the last-place club in the Metropolitan Division.

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These first games out of the break were always going to be about assessing where the Rangers are truly at and preparing for the trade deadline.

Almost nothing about the Rangers’ first two performances should incite president and general manager Chris Drury to make moves in the name of winning the Stanley Cup this season.

“We want to play a lot better 60 minutes, full complete game,” said Will Cuylle, whose first-period power-play goal tied the game 1-1. “I think our third periods have been good lately, so we want to try to carry that over into next game. It’s got to be better than that. It’s not a good performance by us by any means. We know the standard is higher than that, so we need to be better.”

The Rangers were fortunate to be tied at one-all after the first period, in which the visitors were limited to just five shots on goal.

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The fact that the Rangers didn’t record a single shot on goal in the middle frame until there were less than five minutes left only magnified their lack of energy and execution.

Pittsburgh jumped out to a 17-0 edge in shots on the way to a 19-4 advantage in the second period, but the Rangers were still somehow the only team to come out of the frame with a goal.

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J.T. Miller gave the Blueshirts a 2-1 lead with a wrister off the rush in a sequence the Penguins were surely stunned by.

“My evaluation is that it was awful,” Lindgren said of the second period. “You guys all saw it. We were in the D-zone the entire time, we were giving them chance after chance. Everything about it was awful.”

A couple of goals from Ryan Shea through roughly the first 3 ½ minutes of the third period allowed the Penguins to regain their lead.

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Jimmy Vesey tied it up for the Rangers less than a minute after Pittsburgh’s go-ahead goal.

It led to a Rangers push, which culminated in Adam Fox’s game-winner from between the circles in transition at 11:26 in the third.

After giving up five goals on 16 shots and getting pulled in the previous game, Rangers goalie Igor Shesterkin stopped 36 of the 39 shots he saw Sunday evening, including 19 in the middle frame alone.

“You know he’s going to bounce back,” Ryan Lindgren said of Shesterkin. “He’s one of the best goalies in the league. He works so hard, he cares so much. You look at [Saturday], too, we’re leaving him out to dry. Did that tonight, too, in that second period. He made some huge saves, but definitely got to clean some stuff up.”