from Bruce Arthur of the Toronto Star,

In hockey, you tell yourself you earn it, and most of the time you do. You fight for pucks, you fight for position, you skate until your legs fill with water. You take sticks to the face, to the back, to the legs, to the gut. Your knees crumple, your shoulder pop, your ribs break, you bleed. You hold onto the puck, play smart, play hard, play well. You take painkillers, you play. You fight for this. It’s the only way.

And then a puck bounces one direction and not another, and none of it matters. The New York Rangers flew all the way across the country and left their margin for error in Los Angeles, and they couldn’t afford to get unlucky. They were unlucky in Game 2, too, just enough, and that meant they had to have Game 3. They lost to the Los Angeles Kings, 3-0. They trail in the series, 3-0. They might deserve better, but like Clint Eastwood once growled, deserve ain’t got nothing to do with it.

“At some point you’re going to need some puck luck, and we don’t have any right now,” said Rangers goaltender Henrik Lundqvist, after the Rangers outshot L.A. 32-15, and lost. “It feels like they have all of it. We always talk about how you have to earn that puck luck, but I think we are working really hard and doing a lot of good things, but when they score goals like that . . .

“It doesn’t matter what you think you deserve out there. You just have to find ways to win games, and that’s what they have been doing. We can sit here and say we’ve played really well, but at the end, it's about finding ways to win, and we haven’t done that.

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