NHL PLAYOFFS : Messier Hits Milestone, Rangers Rap Nordiques

Team captain Mark Messier scored his 100th playoff goal and the New York Rangers rolled over the Nordiques, 8-3, Monday night at Quebec to even their NHL Eastern Conference playoff series at 1-1.

“It wasn’t a message. It was a matter of getting our own psyche where it has to be,” Messier said.

Sergei Nemchinov and Peter Nedved each scored twice for the Rangers, who blew a two-goal lead in the third period of a 5-4 loss in the series opener on Saturday. They didn’t let that happen again.

Once again it was 4-2 entering the third period. This time, though, the Rangers continued to bottle up young Quebec stars Joe Sakic and Peter Forsberg and jumped on the frustrated Nordiques’ mistakes to run up the score.

“We learned a bitter lesson last game,” Messier said. “We felt we played well for most of that game but we let down and let it slip through our fingers.”

The Rangers defied playoff logic and decided to make a goaltending change, so Glenn Healy was tapped for his first playoff start with the team. He didn’t get an inordinate amount of work (19 saves), but he turned back the dangerous ones. His teammates, practically all of them, did the rest.

New Jersey 3, Boston 0--Martin Brodeur stopped 23 shots at Boston to shut out the Bruins for the second game in a row, as the Devils took a 2-0 lead.

“The big difference is the goaltending,” said Devil forward Tom Chorske, who had an assist and an empty-net goal in the final 90 seconds after New Jersey protected a one-goal lead most of the game. “Martin is just closing the door.”

It was the first time the Bruins have been shut out in consecutive playoff games since the 1943 Stanley Cup finals against Detroit. Brodeur has now blanked the Bruins the last three times he’s faced them in the postseason.

The Devils have beaten the Bruins in six consecutive playoff games, dating back to last year’s second round, when New Jersey dropped the first two at home before winning four in a row to advance to the conference finals.

Pittsburgh 5, Washington 3--The Penguins had 20 minutes to save the game, the series and their season. They’re one of the few teams in hockey for whom so little time is more than enough.

Down two goals and about to go down two games, the Penguins revived their big-gun offense on third-period goals by Luc Robitaille, Jaromir Jagr and Kevin Stevens to rally past the Capitals at Pittsburgh.

The Penguins, on the verge of trailing 2-0 in the series, salvaged a split in Pittsburgh by scoring three times in 3:14 early in the third period to turn a 3-1 deficit into a 4-3 lead.

The first-round series now shifts Wednesday to USAir Arena, where the Capitals were 3-0 in upsetting Pittsburgh in a first-round series last season.

“It’s no big deal going into their building, because we know we can win there,” Stevens said. “It would have been a big deal going down 2-0. We needed this win bad--real bad.”

Philadelphia 3, Buffalo 1--Ron Hextall turned in a second strong performance in goal at Philadelphia as the Flyers took a 2-0 advantage in the series.

Hextall made 29 saves, several of them memorable, as the Flyers won again without injured superstar Eric Lindros, who is recovering from a bruised left eye.

“It was a game of goaltending for us tonight,” Flyer Coach Terry Murray said. “Hextall played a tremendous game.”

Hextall credited Murray with helping him change his approach to preparing for games.

Known for his intensity, which manifests itself in his rhythmic drumming of the goal with his stick during breaks in the action, Hextall said he’s calmer now than when he broke in with the Flyers in 1986-87.

“I’m not 20 anymore, where you can get away with all that stuff,” Hextall said. “I used to skate real, real hard in warmups. In warmups, I used to want to stop every single shot, which I still do, but it doesn’t really count.”

Jason Dawe, who scored two goals in Game 1, said Hextall “is unbelievable right now and we’re going to have to find a way to beat him.”

With Lindros, their first-line center, out, the Flyers relied on second-line members Rob DiMaio and Rod Brind’Amour. Brind’Amour scored the Flyers’ first goal and Anatoli Semenov, Lindros’ replacement on the first line, scored the other.