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Canwest News Service
The video tribute to John Tortorella came 12:23 into the game Friday night during his first trip back here with the Rangers to the place he coached the Lightning to a Stanley Cup in 2004.
"Thanks John and Welcome Back," the scoreboard read. The fans gave him standing ovation.
Tortorella, shown on the board, was stone-faced. That's because his Rangers team embarrassed him, and themselves, in the coach's return home. The 5-1 Rangers loss was, simply put, their worst game of the year, a no-show night of losing battles, losing assignments and losing hockey.
"Everybody stunk," Tortorella said. "Top to bottom, from the goaltender on out, no one played."
A couple of Tortorella's old charges were big factors. Martin St. Louis, Tortorella's prized pupil, had three assists. And Vinny Lecavalier, who battled with Tortorella constantly over effort, had an assist, a mini-fight with Sean Avery and a bushel of scoring chances.
There are Rangers who can be singled out. Michal Rozsival made two grievous errors in the first period that led to scoring chances, continuing a pattern of poor decision-making.
Enver Lisin, dropped to the fourth line with the return of Ales Kotalik, made very little out of his 8:46 of ice time.
Brian Boyle was on ice for three goals against and lost two fights. But it was, as Tortorella put it, a group effort.
"Just look at our start, we weren't ready to play," Chris Drury said. "We just wasted our good effort down in Florida."
That Wednesday game was also a group effort, 17 players pulling together to play a smart road game when first Wade Redden went down with in injury, and then down to 16 when Matt Gilroy stood up for his team and got 17 penalty minutes.
Friday night was the flip side: Dumb and deaf to the coach's pleas for consistency.
Bobby Sanguinetti made his NHL debut and his only error was screening Steven Valiquette on Kurtis Foster's second of the night, which made it 5-0.
Ryan Callahan's garbage-time goal, his first in seven games, denied Mike Smith's shutout with 2:07 left.
"We're going to have to make a decision here sooner or later about whether we're going to be a consistent hockey club," Tortorella said. "If we're going to be a team that wants to be there at the end, we have to decide that."
Tortorella's decision to pull Henrik Lundqvist after Paul Szczechura's dribbler bounced through traffic and in to make it 4-0 Tampa 12:25 into the second did not sit well with the Rangers goaltender. He skated off the ice as Valiquette skated on and disappeared into the locker-room for the remainder of the game.
Tortorella didn't like Lundqvist's night, but the game could have been 10-0 without him.
"I was expecting to keep on playing," Lundqvist said. "They made a call, and that's it."
