from Larry Brooks of the New York Post,

’Twas the ghost of seasons past at the Garden on Friday night for a 7-4 Rangers loss to the Wild that came three days after a 7-2 pasting in Pittsburgh.

The scope of the drubbings by these two very good teams not only will hang over the three-day Christmas recess, but also it prompted Alain Vigneault to give a coach’s version of ‘Bah! Humbug!’ ”

“As much as it might have looked that we gave a pass on the prior game, there is definitely not a pass on this one here,” Vigneault said. “We need quite a few players to up their level. This is a challenging league and to win, you better play well. Tonight we didn’t have enough guys playing well.

“There’s no excuse for tonight. We had one line — Step’s line — that gave its ‘A’ game,” Vigneault said in referring to the Chris Kreider-Derek Stepan-Mats Zuccarello unit that was zoned in from the start and was in on all four New York goals. “When you’re playing a team that’s won nine in a row, you have to bring your best and we had one line going.

“The rest just weren’t good enough, from the goaltender on out.”

The goaltender was Henrik Lundqvist. At least it was until he yielded three goals — on two of which he looked bad — on four shots within the first 4:55 of the second period. That was after he had surrendered a soft one to Mikael Granlund midway through the first period that allowed the Wild to tie it 1-1 after Kreider had opened the scoring at 3:54.

continued

Below, watch the game highlights...