While the New York Rangers are unable to score or win on home ice, the San Jose Sharks are having trouble winning anywhere.
The Rangers are attempting to end a season-opening four-game home losing streak Thursday night when they host the winless Sharks.
New York is 0-4-0 at home and was shut out by a combined 6-0 margin in losses to the Pittsburgh Penguins, Washington Capitals and Edmonton Oilers. New York had a scoreless streak of 180:57 on home ice — the longest to start a season amongst current teams — before Artemi Panarin scored 57 seconds into Monday night’s game.
After Panarin’s goal, the Rangers took a 3-1 loss to the Minnesota Wild. Panarin scored after getting a goal and three assists in Saturday’s 4-3 comeback win at Montreal, but the Rangers were outshot 32-24 against Minnesota and rarely came close to tying the game after ceding the tiebreaking goal 8:16 into the third period.
“It’s disappointing for that,” New York defenseman Adam Fox said. “You want to take advantage of that. You have a crowd behind you. You score. You want to get some momentum and build off that, and we didn’t do a good job of that.”
The Rangers were scoreless on their lone power-play attempt and are 0-for-9 on the man advantage in their home games. They were also outshot 16-6 in the first period after Panarin scored.
“We scored early, which was great, but I thought we got outplayed,” Rangers coach Mike Sullivan said. “We got outplayed all night.”
The Rangers are attempting to avoid their second five-game home losing streak in seven months. Last season, they went 0-4-1 on home ice from March 5-20.
San Jose is off to a 0-4-2 start after starting last season with a nine-game skid (0-7-2) and the previous season with 11 straight losses (0-10-1).
The Sharks are getting outscored 29-16 and took their third one-goal loss so far when a late comeback fell short in Tuesday’s 4-3 loss to the New York Islanders in the opener of their four-game road trip.
San Jose scored the first goal for the third time this season when Collin Graf scored a short-handed goal. The Sharks lost the lead less than a minute later, gave up the fourth goal on an errant line change and trailed by two goals before Macklin Celebrini scored with 9:44 left in the third.
“I thought this was probably our most complete game of the year,” San Jose coach Ryan Warsofsky said. “I liked our effort. We had some scoring, good scoring chances. I think we only had them for nine chances against 5-on-5. Those are wins more times than not. So, it’s got to keep plugging away.”
The Sharks took their latest loss while producing a season-high 36 shots on goal. San Jose generated at least 30 shots on goal for the second straight game after averaging 21 shots in its first four losses.
New York is 11-0-2 in the past 13 meetings, including a 5-0-1 mark on home ice in that span.
