NEW YORK _ Three third-period goals powered the Rangers to their fourth straight victory and to .500 Tuesday night, when they rallied from a two-goal, second-period deficit to beat the Montreal Canadiens, 5-3, at Madison Square Garden.
Pavel Buchnevich, Neal Pionk and Mika Zibanejad scored to erase a 3-2 deficit after two as the Rangers improved their record to 7-7-1. Buchnevich, playing in his second straight game after having sat out two straight as a healthy scratch, tied the score at 3 when he jammed in the rebound of Marc Staal's shot at 8:25 of the third period. And then Pionk, with the teams playing four-on-four, went the length of the ice and cut in from the left wing to score his second goal of the season at 17:16 to give the Rangers their first lead of the game.
Zibanejad banged in a loose puck off a misplay by Canadiens defenseman Jeff Petry to ice it at 18:12.
Tomas Tatar's first goal opened the scoring 23 seconds into the game, but the Rangers tied it a goal late in the period by Chris Kreider, who slammed a shot into a vacated net off a pretty pass by Kevin Hayes.
But the game nearly got away from the Rangers in the second, when they gave up two goals and took an inordinate amount of penalties. First, Tatar deflected in a pass from Phillip Danault to make it 2-1 at 4:40 of the period, and then Lias Andersson, called up from Hartford and inserted into the lineup in place of the injured Brett Howden, took a high sticking penalty at 6:09. Max Domi converted for the Canadiens to give Montreal a 3-1 lead at 6:27.
And then the penalties started to come in waves. It started when Domi went to hit Filip Chytil at the Rangers' blue line. Chytil saw Domi coming and spun away, but Domi got a piece of him and sent Chytil's stick flying. Pionk grabbed Domi and wanted to fight him, but Domi refused, and play continued. Pionk then hit a Montreal player into the boards and Cody McLeod hit him as well. That, of course, resulted in a gathering of angry players at center ice and when all was said and done, McLeod ended up with a two-minute charging penalty, a four-minute roughing penalty, and a 10-minute misconduct penalty. Montreal's Mike Reilly got a roughing penalty and the net result was that the Rangers had to kill four minutes of penalty time.
Before that was over, Brendan Smith was sent off for allegedly tripping Joel Armia _ who looked on replay as though he dived _ and a few seconds later, Tatar was sent off for interference against Pionk, who looked on replay as though he may also have dived. A couple more Canadiens penalties followed, and eventually, one second after a penalty to Danault expired, Tony DeAngelo scored with a wrist shot that hit the crossbar and bounced in at 17:45, pulling the Rangers within 3-2.
