Video Breakdown: J.T. Miller scores the same goal twice in nine days
J.T. Miller and the Rangers power play connects for the same goal twice against two different opponents.
Welcome back to Video Breakdown, where I use fancy arrows to show you how and why the Rangers score the goals they do.
Today's edition is a special two for one special, please control your excitement until the comment section.
Let's flash back to December, shall we? The Rangers were still finding their groove and had started to pile up wins and climb back into the playoff picture. A couple of the big reasons for the "resurgence" of the Rangers was that they started playing a full forward corps as well as having the power play start putting up points.
Our first goal comes from the first of the Rangers back to back wins against the Carolina Hurricanes.
Now let's take a quick look at how J.T. Miller got that wide open on the power play
So after a quick outlet from Ryan McDonagh, Mats Zuccarello feathered a hell of a pass to a streaming J.T. Miller that had a wide open stretch of ice through the neutral zone. The Hurricanes were all caught watching Zuccarello and allowed for Miller to find all that open ice.
Once he breaks away, Miller gets enough time to get Cam Ward to bite on the shot way too early and gets himself caught down allowing J.T. to maneuver around him and stuff the puck into the net for the goal.
Now let's flash forward to nine days later with the Rangers playing against the Stars deep in the heart of Texas
Another quick breakout, another outlet pass, and yet another breakaway goal from J.T. Miller. Let's go through it all again, shall we?
Another quick outlet from McDonagh has the penalty kill focused on Mats Zuccarello with J.T. Miller streaking through the neutral zone opening up an open stick for Zuccarello to hit. Dallas' PKers are actually in better positioning than the Canes but Zuke does a great job pulling them out of position to find Miller.
Here you can see the Dallas penalty killer activate towards Zuccarello which allows J.T. to fly down the middle of Dallas' ice unimpeded.
Miller has some great recognition seeing that Kari Lehtonen is still in transition and that he's reading the puck so J.T., with his head up all the way, picks it top glove just as Lehtonen goes down into his butterfly.
There you have it, two goals in two games that were essentially carbon copies of each other. Thoughts guys?
