Familiar flaw does in Rangers despite improved effort

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Ryan Lindgen of the Rangers battles Brett Connolly for the puck.SUNRISE, Fla. — Better, but hardly complete.

The Rangers had quite an improvement from one of their worst games in recent memory, but were undercut by their struggling penalty kill and lost, 4-3, to the Panthers at BB&T Center on Saturday night.

The Rangers (8-8-2) were coming off a historically bad loss, a 9-3 defeat at Tampa Bay on Thursday night. It was hard to be equally bad, so they were certainly better in this one. But it did look a lot like the most recent time these two teams met, just this past Sunday at the Garden, when the Panthers (10-5-5) ended up taking a 6-5 win in the shootout — a game that Rangers…