NEW YORK — Mats Zuccarello still did not know after Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Final how he had failed to score a goal that could have changed the complexion of the series. All he knew was that he saw the puck sailing in the wrong direction after he shot from such close range, his skate was in the blue paint of Jonathan Quick's goal crease.
"It hit the post, or he saved it, or whatever," the Norwegian winger said after the Rangers' 3-0 loss to the Kings on Monday night gave Los Angeles precisely that advantage in the best-of-seven series. "I don't know. I wish I could score on that one, but the bounces weren't there today. If we get that, we're up 1-0, and maybe the game changes. It's easy to say now. You do your best to try to score, but it doesn't always go that way."
It didn't go that way for Zuccarello, and it continued not to go that way for Rick Nash, who had eight shot attempts, four on goal, and remained scoreless in the series. Quick has denied Nash 15 times in three games. Nash scored on 10.1 percent of his shots in the regular season, but has only three goals on an NHL-high 80 shots in the playoffs.
Just as Quick denied Zuccarello in the first period of what was then a scoreless game with the heel of his stick blade, sending the puck caroming off toward the opposite side of the Madison Square Garden rink, Nash had his own how-in-the-name-of-your-preferred-deity-did-he-not-score-there moment in the second, with the Kings up 2-0. Nash made a great move around the back of the net to generate a wraparound try, but as he turned the corner, the puck fluttered off his stick, and he whiffed at an attempt to bat it somewhere useful. Although Nash drew a penalty on Drew Doughty on the play, what the Rangers needed was a goal — a goal that never did come.
As the offensive star of his team, Nash will take a ton of heat if this is how the Rangers go down, an exceptionally likely fate given the history of teams trailing 3-0 in best-of-seven series — this year's Kings comeback against the Sharks notwithstanding. Nash knows this, so he has to be delicate with the way he responds to questions on subjects like his satisfaction with his level of play.
"You can't be satisfied when we're losing," he said. "You know, right now, chances aren't good enough. They've got to be going in, and you've got to be helping your team win."
The problem for Nash is the same as the problem for every other player in hockey, which is that once the puck leaves your stick, you no longer control what happens to it, if you ever really did in the first place. Quick got in the way of 32 Rangers shots, and his teammates 20 more. New York had a 59-33 advantage in shot attempts, which on a random night in December would have been enough to chalk up the game as a tough loss where a couple of pucks deflected past Henrik Lundqvist, one more goal came on an odd-man rush with another weird bounce off Ryan McDonagh setting up Mike Richards, and there's another game tomorrow night in Columbus. But this was not a random night in December. It was a game the Rangers absolutely needed to have in June, but could not get.
"They played well," Zuccarello said. "They blocked shots. Quick played well. We have to find a way to score goals. We had some really good looks, and like I said, it's frustrating. I don't know."
There wasn't anything for Zuccarello to know, other than frustration. The Rangers' shot advantage was due to a combination of playing from behind for two periods and 0.7 seconds, and having 11:58 of power play time to the Kings' 6:57. But the fact remained that Quick, the owner of a .906 save percentage in the playoffs coming into the game, put up a 1.000 for a night.
"Yeah, we gave up shots, but that's why we have a goaltender," Kings captain Dustin Brown said. "It's one of those things, when you're on the PK for as long as we were, they're gonna get shots. Quickie was Quickie."
That would be the 2012 version of Quick, the one who stonewalled the NHL to the tune of a .946 save percentage and 1.41 goals-against average with three shutouts en route to lifting the Cup. As average as he can look sometimes, Quick is capable of that — witness his five shutouts in a 30-game stretch earlier this season as another example. When he's on top of his game, the Kings are borderline unbeatable, and for the Rangers, that means a lot of self-evaluation that amounts to, "Well, dammit."
"Everything was going in the right direction," said Rangers defenseman Marc Staal. "They got a couple of opportunities, and they hurt us. (Quick) was sharp. We had a few rebound chances, and we were throwing pucks at the net. Not enough scrambles, I don't think, and the ones that we did have, we just missed. We weren't able to convert. ... It's tough when you have the puck for a lot of the game and you control the game. We forechecked how we wanted to, and it's a break here or there, and they make us pay for it. It's frustrating, absolutely."