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 coach David Quinn said resembled “a shootout at the O.