NEW YORK _ Every morning when Alain Vigneault gets up, he looks at the NHL standings, specifically the Metropolitan Division, where the Rangers reside.
"I'm assuming if you're a player, you do the same thing," he said before Monday night's 3-2 loss to the Lightning in Madison Square Garden, where the Rangers are 1-3-1 in the last five.
When he wakes up Tuesday, Vigneault will see the Blueshirts still with 90 points. But with 12 games to play in the regular season, they still have a solid grip on the first wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference.
Center Brayden Point scored the winner _ and his second goal of the night _ at 13:21 of the third period. The rookie reached between Ryan McDonagh and Marc Staal and redirected Ondrej Palat's shot through Antti Raanta, starting his second straight game.
Although the Rangers lead the league with 89 goals in third periods, they failed to come up with one against backup Peter Budaj. They managed only seven shots in the final 20 minutes and fell to 9-3 in the second game of back-to-backs.
The Rangers certainly had opportunities in the first 40 minutes, with 20 shots on Budaj and 10 that missed the net. With the score tied at 1 early in the second, Pavel Buchnevich missed a wide-open cage from 25 feet on the right side after Mika Zibanejad slid him a perfect setup. Just over a minute later, the Lightning took a 2-1 lead. Gabriel Dumont got a piece of Jason Garrison's soft shot from the right point and the puck bounced past Raanta's stick at 5:04.
Zibanejad couldn't pop in a bouncer at the left post near the 10-minute mark, and Budaj covered. But Michael Grabner poked the puck away from Garrison in the defensive zone and slipped a shot under Budaj at 10:22, his team-leading 27th goal, which forged a 2-2 tie. It was Grabner's second game back after missing five games with a sore oblique/hip.
But the Lightning, now with 75 points, spent more time in the Rangers' zone in the second period than the home team would have liked. That set the stage for a push against the Blueshirts, who played in Detroit on Sunday night. They kept cycling and making plays below the hash marks. Raanta gloved Nikita Kucherov's wrister with 6:22 left, and Alex Killorn just missed a tip-in with over two minutes to play.
In the first, the Rangers had 13 shots on Budaj and allowed only three on Raanta. But all it took was one to tie the score at 7:43 with Brendan Smith in the box for tripping. Kucherov found Point alone in the slot, and he beat Raanta just inside the far post. Raanta stopped all 38 shots he faced in last week's shutout against the Lightning.
Defenseman Steven Kampfer's one-timer that zipped past Budaj's glove _ his first goal as a Ranger _ had provided the lead at 5:53. Chris Kreider's assist gave him a four-game point streak and points in five of six.
But Budaj did deny Kreider's breakaway backhander with his left pad 47 seconds after the puck dropped. He also made close-in stops on Rick Nash, who slid a shot wide on a breakaway, and Derek Stepan, on the doorstep, later in the period.
