Rangers center Mika Zibanejad was wrongly convicted of a crime he didn’t commit.
A high-stick that left the Islanders’ Leo Komarov bloodied wasn’t the result of the Ranger player’s stick. No, this was Isle-on-Isle crime.
It was Valteri Filppula’s twig that clipped Komarov up high, busting out the ketchup on his fellow fishstick.
The call on the ice, though, left the Blueshirts shorthanded for four minutes.
New York Rangers head coach David Quinn was frustrated after the case of mistaken identity left his club shorthanded, even though the official later admitted to erring on the call.
“[Referee Dan O’Halloran] came over and apologized,” Quinn said. “Whoop-de-doo.”
Though the Islanders didn’t score on the extended man-advantage, Quinn felt the multiple penalty kills in the game tilted the ice in the Islanders’ favor.
“When you’ve got to kill eight straight minutes of penalties in that short amount of time, it affects the game,” said Quinn. “They got two [goals] in that stretch [in the second period] and you’re out of sync, you’re using some players more than you want to. You’ve got to react to it and you’ve got to recover from it and we weren’t able to.”
Quinn was also critical of the officials’ call on Brady Skjei, whose penalty 4:43 into the second period led to the Islanders’ go-ahead goal that put them up 4-3.
“I had a huge problem with [the interference call on Brady Skjei]. First, the ref doesn’t see it, then [he] reacts to someone falling down. He fell down. There was no penalty but, hey, you’ve got to deal with it. It happens to everybody and you’ve got to kill the penalty. We didn’t.”
New York (the ones from Brooklyn, splitting time at their second home in Nassau County) went on to defeat New York (the ones from Manhattan) 7-5, with an empty-netter in there.
To Quinn’s credit, he avoided pointing fingers at the stripes for the loss.
“The story of the game was our lack of play around our own net. We just didn’t play hard enough,” said Quinn.
“It wasn’t the referees; it wasn’t anything along those lines.”
