NEW YORK — Typically, a matchup between the New York Rangers and Buffalo Sabres around the midpoint of the season features a team firmly in the playoff race against one plummeting deeper into better odds at the Draft lottery. This year is no different. But which team is in which role is. The hotte st team in the National Hockey League, the Sabres used third-string goaltender Colten Ellis and still walked away with a 5-2 win over the floundering Blueshirts at Madison Square Garden on Thursday night, marking their 12th victory in their last 13 games. It was a win that propelled them into the second and final wild card spot in the Eastern Conference standings, a rare spot for a franchise that finds itself on a New York Jets-esque run of futility in having gone 15 years without so much as a postseason appearance. Things seemed to be tracking similarly this season, with general manager Kevyn Adams fired and replaced by Jarmo Kekalainen, and head coach Lindy Ruff essentially having one foot out the door with another abysmal start to what felt like a long season ahead. So, what changed? “I think confidence is obviously a big thing with us,” said forward Josh Doan, who scored the game’s opening goal at just 4:07 into the first period. “Learning that we can be a team that can win and push back a little against some of these teams with good players, and trusting each other and having fun on the bench. I think that’s been the biggest thing, is there’s a lot of support on the bench no matter what’s going on, and when you have that, it’s easy to build off of it and lean on each other.” The Rangers never held a lead against their cross-state rivals, chasing the game throughout after Doan’s early go-ahead goal. Having seemed to build some momentum late in the third period in drawing a double-minor high-sticking penalty with just 5:36 remaining in regulation and trailing by just one, Mattias Samuelsson’s jaw-dropping shorthanded goal at a seemingly impossible angle that beat Jonathan Quick just 14 seconds into the penalty kill after a turnover at the blue line from an otherwise-invisible-all-night Alexis Lafreniere instead sent fans streaming for the exits, and perhaps signalled a change in how things would have gone in a similar situation for previous Sabres teams. “I think we’ve been in situations a lot like this in this recent stretch, so definitely getting more comfortable holding on to leads in the third,” Samuelsson said. “It’s hard to win in this league, and as a group that (may have not) done as much as we should have in the past, I think we’ve finally turned a corner in learning how to close out games.”   ...read more read less