Rangers blow winnable game against Kraken as late rally falls short

A long and emotional week for the Rangers concluded with a loss in a very winnable game.

Blowing a two-goal lead at a time when the team is in need of a pick-me-up is perhaps the most discouraging circumstance that could’ve befallen the Blueshirts at this moment in time, but a 7-5 defeat at the hands of the Kraken on Sunday afternoon unfolded on the Madison Square Garden ice all the same.

Facing a Seattle team competing in the final contest of a four-game road trip out east, the Rangers took charge of the contest early before veering off and hemorrhaging turnovers to allow a clearly drained opponent to waltz right back into the game rather effortlessly.

“I feel like we were kind of just stretching the game a little bit, looking for plays that were not there yet instead of collectively breaking the puck out and working on the forecheck as a group of five,” Reilly Smith said of the Kraken’s four-goal second period. “I think we were probably looking for easy offense a little bit too much in the second period and it kind of caught us.”

The Rangers may have come close to salvaging the game in the final 20 minutes of regulation, scoring twice in the span of 2:31 on goals from K’Andre Miller and Alexis Lafreniere — but only after the Kraken had built a 6-3 advantage by way of five straight goals from the 14:06 mark of the second period to the 11:13 mark in the third.

It had the Garden buzzing with hope again, but an empty-net goal from Yanni Gourde halted the too little, too late rally.

The Rangers have hit a soft spot in their schedule that they need to take advantage of in order to close their gap with the top of the Metropolitan Division and get this season officially back on track.

With the Kraken sitting in the bottom tier of the Pacific Division, this was supposed to be the start.

The last-place team in the NHL, the Blackhawks, venture to the Garden on Monday.

The Blueshirts will now have to start there.

A 3-1 Rangers lead — built via Smith’s first-period score, an end-to-end play from Filip Chytil and a power-play goal from Trocheck in the second period — lasted for a good bulk of the middle frame.

Whether it was the Rangers sitting back or the Kraken getting riled up as the game progressed, the shift was stark and swift.

Seattle started swarming the Rangers zone, making the most of everything the Rangers gave them and scoring twice in just 1:28 to tie it up less than five minutes before the second intermission.

Lindgren lost Brandon Tanev crashing the net on the first, while Eeli Tolvanen’s one-timer went top corner on Rangers goalie Jonathan Quick for the second.

Quick wasn’t his sharpest self in the loss, in which he gave up six goals on 21 shots.

A lost defensive-zone draw for the Rangers then led to the Kraken taking their first lead of the day.

Oliver Bjorkstand scored his second goal of the game on a net-front deflection off a Brandon Montour shot to put Seattle up 4-3.

It was deflating for the Rangers and for Madison Square Garden, which seemingly had all the air sucked out of it.

“You’ve got to stay positive at times like this,” Trocheck said. “Make sure that we know what we’re capable of. Like we played in the third period, I feel like we played like a team that knew we could come back from down two or three goals. That’s the sense we had in the room last year any time we were down a couple goals. I think this is the step in the right direction in that sense, making sure that we have confidence in our team and I think positivity feeds into that.

“But, yeah, you’ve got to win games and you’ve got to do that for a full 60 minutes, you can’t just have that urgency when you’re down.”