Game 8 – Islanders 2* Rangers 2
Record – 4-1-3, 11 points
Last Year – 0-0-0, 0 pts
Points Out of 8th – Nah, still in first
Islanders – Off since Saturday, dressed down by the coach and GM, driven through two punishing practices, with talk of revenge for the season sweep in 2003-04, and the best they could come up with is to have their goalie stand on his head to bail them out?

* I think shootouts are stupid, so I won’t be acknowledging their result, unless the Rangers win.

- Two songs come to mind today. One, the Buffalo Springfield’s ‘For What It's Worth’, goes “There’s something happening here….What it is ain’t exactly clear.” And the other is the theme from the Twilight Zone. October 19, eight games into what is supposed to be a rebuilding season, and the Garden was as tense as the White House as they await the Plamegate indictments. What exactly is going on here? I know, we’re supposed to be happy just to see a young team with a future coming out and giving it all every night, but I guess earning at least a point in six of the first seven games can get people thinking. And it didn’t hurt that the despised rivals were in town, because who could possibly stomach the bubble being burst by the Fish Sticks?

With both teams outfitted in their classic jerseys, it seemed like old times, as the action rocked back and forth (mostly forth, in the Rangers’ case), with the crowd inflating and deflating accordingly along with the plot twists. After a first period in which the home team dominated to the point where I found myself laughing at times, but found themselves down 1-0 (for the first time this year), I saw Ranger fans slumped in their seats with their familiar expressions of impending doom. That was actually nice to see, because the cause had been so hopeless in past years that too many times the prevailing mood was one of apathy.

Big Plays: It seemed like the same old new story in the first, as the Blueshirts spent virtually the entire first fifteen minutes in the Fish Stick zone, only to be frustrated by Rick DiPietro. For the second game in a row, Marek Malik was absolutely robbed on what should have been a simple stuff-in off a cross-ice pass. Half the crowd had already started to celebrate, but there was to be no Rangers Goal song. (NOTE: Can we PLEASE get rid of that fucking thing already?) Malik must be wondering if he’ll ever score. Besides the 35 shots fired on DiPietro, the Rangers shot wide or fanned on a multitude of others, not to mention Jagr breaking his stick on his shootout try.

The own-goal off of Jagr’s pass/shot was a crucial one, getting the team back into the game immediately after they seemed to be taken out of it. But the Isles were able to settle down and take the crowd out of the game after that, using an aggressive deep forechecking scheme to repel the Blueshirts’ attack over the next 12 minutes or so. Jason Blake was by far their best player besides DiPietro, and on one power play, he pinned the Rangers in their own zone virtually single-handedly for the first 30 seconds. Thus it helped that it was Blake who was penalized when the power play finally clicked late in regulation after seven failures as Petr Prucha, seeing ice time at that crucial stage of the game despite getting less than eight minutes total for the game, stood his ground in slot traffic to tip in Tyutin’s low shot toward the net.

- The Rangers had two shots in OT, and Prucha and Tom Poti were robbed by DiPietro, the latter after a great spin-o-rama move from the point. Prucha will likely see more ice time, as Renney hinted post-game of some lineup changes for tonight’s rematch.

- Lundqvist probably played his best game of the season in “defeat.”

- Doesn't it always seem like the Rangers play more games than anyone else early and that other teams always have games in hand?