Rangers Rout Ducks 5-2 at the Garden Behind Bjorkstrand's Two Goals

NEW YORK

Some games tilt. This one fell over in the first two minutes and never got back up. Behind two goals from Oliver Bjorkstrand, the New York Rangers routed the Anaheim Ducks 5-2 at Madison Square Garden on Monday night, a win built period by period — one goal in the first, three in the second, a fifth early in the third — before Anaheim scored twice in the final 70 seconds to spoil Dylan Garand’s shutout and flatter the final margin. ESPN’s official game data has the shots nearly even, 31-30 for the Ducks, which tells you everything about how misleading a shot counter can be: for 58 minutes this was a coronation. The Rangers are 6-0-0 in their own building, and the Ducks’ perfect road start is a memory.

Seventy-eight seconds was all it took

The tone was set before most of the Garden had found its seats. At 1:18 of the first period, defenseman Sean Durzi snapped home his second goal of the season, with assists to Pavel Dorofeyev and Tye Kartye, and Anaheim spent the rest of the night chasing a game that kept getting further away. The first period stayed 1-0, but the pressure told: New York controlled the puck, and when the second period opened, the dam went. Captain J.T. Miller tipped in his second of the season at 4:38, finishing a feed from Adam Fox — his 10th assist of the young season — and Alexis Lafrenière. At 10:17, Gabe Perreault made it 3-0 with his fourth goal, set up by Mika Zibanejad and Lafrenière again. And at 13:14, Oliver Bjorkstrand scored unassisted to turn a bad night for the Ducks into a rout before the second intermission.

Bjorkstrand finishes the argument

If Anaheim’s dressing room produced any plan for the third period, it survived about three and a half minutes. At 3:26, Bjorkstrand struck again — his second goal of the night and fourth of the season, a snap shot assisted by Taylor Raddysh and Braden Schneider — to make it 5-0 and turn the remainder into bookkeeping. The two Anaheim goals at the death, from defenseman Nick Jensen at 18:51 and AJ Greer 36 seconds later, changed the scoreline and nothing else. The distribution of the damage is the story as much as the total: five goals from four scorers, eight Rangers assists spread across the lineup, and production from the blue line (Durzi, plus helpers for Fox and Schneider) as well as the top six. Lafrenière’s two assists quietly make him one of the most productive Rangers of the season’s first month, and Miller’s tip-in gave the captain a goal in a game his team never trailed. Nights like this are how a good home team becomes a feared one, and the numbers underneath agree with the eyes: New York’s 5-0-0 home record entering tonight was the foundation of a 6-3-1 start, and the Rangers have now outscored Anaheim in every period of this game.

Garand’s near-shutout, Husso’s long night

The other bench tells a simpler story. Ville Husso faced 30 shots and allowed five goals, an .833 save percentage on a night when Anaheim’s skaters gave him neither a lead nor much margin. The Ducks were not shut out for lack of pucks on net — they finished with 31 shots, one more than New York — but Garand answered the first 29 of them, including stops on Anaheim power plays, and carried a shutout to within 69 seconds of the horn before Jensen’s slap shot and Greer’s snap shot beat him on consecutive shifts. It finished 29 saves on 31 shots and a .935 save percentage: the defining early-season line on Garand’s résumé even without the zero. Anaheim’s best young talent, including Leo Carlsson and Cutter Gauthier, was held off the scoresheet entirely. For a team that arrived at the Garden 3-0-0 on the road, this is what a first road loss looks like when it arrives all at once.

What it means from here

Six home games, six wins: that is the headline the rest of the Eastern Conference has to read tomorrow morning. The Rangers’ start is no longer a hot week — it is a pattern, built on depth scoring, a blue line that joins the attack, and goaltending that has given its skaters permission to play downhill. Anaheim, 4-4-0 after its first road loss, will process this one as a correction rather than a crisis: young teams with perfect road records eventually meet a building like this one, and the Ducks generated 31 shots — they know the gap is about finishing and goaltending, not effort. But make no mistake about the order of the stories in the NHL tonight. While Philadelphia, Toronto and Utah were busy with one-goal games, the loudest statement of the evening came from West 33rd Street, and it was delivered by a Rangers team that scored before the anthem echo had faded and never once stopped. Our full Monday-night roundup is running on the sports front, and tonight’s live NHL roundup has every other score as it develops.