Sometimes a season turns on a week. Alexis Lafreniere is having that week — and on Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden, he kept it rolling, scoring twice in the first period as the New York Rangers beat the Tampa Bay Lightning 4-1 to stay perfect at home and hand Tampa Bay its second loss of the season, both of them to New York.
Lafreniere scored 62 seconds into the game and again at 12:47 of the first period, according to the Associated Press, extending his goal streak to a career-best four games. He has seven goals during that streak, which began with a hat trick against the New York Islanders on Oct. 6, NHL.com reported. For the No. 1 pick in the 2020 draft — a player whose development has been debated shift by shift for five years in the loudest market in hockey — this is what the breakthrough was always supposed to look like.
Over before it really started
Tampa Bay arrived on a four-game winning streak. It left having been chased out of the game in the opening thirteen minutes. Lafreniere beat Andrei Vasilevskiy from in close barely a minute in, then struck again midway through the period, with Tye Kartye assisting on both goals. Kartye is authoring a heater of his own — he scored twice in Sunday's 6-2 rout of Vancouver, per Reuters — and the Rangers' depth scoring, so often the missing piece in recent seasons, is suddenly a strength.
Zemgus Girgensons got Tampa Bay back within 2-1 late in the first with his first goal of the season, and for a while the Lightning pushed. But Will Cuylle restored the two-goal cushion late in the second period, redirecting a Sean Durzi point shot past Vasilevskiy for his third goal of the season, and Mika Zibanejad closed it out with a short-handed empty-net goal at 17:16 of the third, scored during the final seconds of a Tampa Bay six-on-four power play, according to Reuters.
The kid in net
The other half of this story is standing in the Rangers' crease, and he was not supposed to be there. Dylan Garand made 25 saves in his second consecutive start since Igor Shesterkin went down with a season-ending lower-body injury last Friday at Washington — a loss that, on paper, should have derailed New York's season before it really began.
Instead, Garand has won both starts, and on Tuesday the Garden crowd was chanting his first name by the end of the night — a chant usually reserved for Shesterkin. NHL.com noted Garand's late heroics: a point-blank glove save on John Carlson with 8:16 remaining, a pad save on Brayden Point's backhand with about five and a half minutes left, and another stop on Nikita Kucherov during Tampa Bay's desperate six-on-four. Reuters reported Garand improved his career record to 5-1-1 and has yet to allow more than two non-shootout goals in any of his six NHL starts. Vasilevskiy, at the other end, made 19 saves and fell to 4-2-0 with the Lightning; both Tampa Bay losses this season have come against these Rangers, including a 5-1 defeat in New York's home opener on Oct. 1.
A building that is a fortress again
The home record deserves its own paragraph, because Rangers fans have earned the right to enjoy it. New York is 5-0-0 at Madison Square Garden, all in regulation. Last season, the Rangers won nine regulation games at home all year and did not record their fifth home win until Dec. 20, in their 18th home game, per NHL.com. This season they have matched that win total in five games. It is just the third time in franchise history the Rangers have won their first five at home, and the best home start since the 1990-91 team opened 8-0-0 at the Garden.
Head coach Mike Sullivan pointed to his leadership group after the game, crediting them, in NHL.com's account, with leading by example and establishing the Rangers at home — a stated goal for this group entering the season. Whatever the formula, it is working: at 6-2-0, the Rangers have won six of eight, and they are doing it with their franchise goaltender out for the year and a former No. 1 pick finally playing like one.
That last part is the headline that matters most in the long run. Lafreniere's 12th career multi-goal game, per Reuters, and his seventh goal — a total he did not reach until his 31st game last season — suggest a player who has stopped thinking and started finishing. First-period goals 62 seconds in do not happen by accident four games in a row. The streak will end eventually; streaks always do. But the confidence underneath it looks permanent in a way it never quite did before.
What is next
The Rangers now take their act on the road, visiting the New Jersey Devils on Thursday and the Columbus Blue Jackets on Saturday, both Metropolitan Division opponents. Tampa Bay (4-2-0) heads home to host Seattle on Thursday, looking to restart a winning streak that New York has now interrupted twice.
For one night, though, the story was simple: the Garden is loud again, the backup goalie is beloved, and Alexis Lafreniere cannot miss. Rangers fans have waited a long time for all three of those sentences to be true at once. Read more from a busy NHL night in our recap of Connor McDavid's 800th game and Montreal's shootout win over Buffalo, and keep up with every score on the Previously sports hub.