One thing I feel like has been a theme throughout these meetings this season has been the Rangers having a much better time in the 2nd period than we are. The long change has really been giving us problems, and that's annoying because that's as much of a discipline problem as much as it is anything else. The 2nd period in Game 1 was really where the mental rust of nine days off showed up for us. I don't really think there was any physical signs of that - you don't control the 1st period of a game when you're rusty - but the details were miserable. Coverage issues, lack of rotation, just made things way too easy for the Rangers and they have players capable of taking advantage of that - I don't in my life think Carolina beats us 6-2 in any game if we'd met them. That Stamkos and Kucherov, of all players, flubbed multiple Grade A's while it was still a close/tie game didn't help at all either.
Clean up the details, and I think there's a good chance we get this to 1-1 coming home. Game 1 against Toronto was worse than that and we cleaned it up pretty quickly for Game 2. As bad as it was, it was only one game. But we're definitely putting a lot of eggs in this game tonight...given that we've never been a strong home team, I can't say coming home needing to win both games to tie it up will make me all that comfortable, so this is very close to "must win" realm for me.