Opposites have rarely attracted as much attention in these icy parts as have the Rangers and Devils these last three decades.
You’ve had Broadway’s team attempting to buy its way to championships through the additions of marquee veterans who had made their bones in other precincts.
You’ve had the team on the other side of the river painstakingly building three Stanley Cup championship squads through the draft.
Well, that has been the narrative, anyway.
Because while it’s accurate the Blueshirts were a patchwork operation for years and years, always casting their title-lonely eyes elsewhere, the Devils historically have been as active in pursuing and acquiring veterans as any team in the NHL.
The bedrock of the mini-dynasty was formed by draft selections Martin Brodeur, Scott Niedermayer, John MacLean, Ken Daneyko, Patrik Elias and Petr Sykora, but general manager Lou Lamoriello delved into the market early and often to complement his club’s core assets.
Big game-big name players Claude Lemieux, Stephane Richer and Neal Broten, essentials in the run to the club’s first Cup in 1995, came from elsewhere. Phil Housley came as a rental in 1996. Dave Andreychuk came that same year, and Doug Gilmour a year after that. Vladimir Malakhov was a lend-lease acquisition in 2000, the same year the Devils traded for Alex Mogilny.
The Rangers, well … the epitome of the way the Blueshirts went about their business following their 1994 Stanley Cup championship manifested itself during the summer of 1999, when general manager Neil Smith signed six free agents — a goaltender (Kirk McLean); two defensemen (Stephane Quintal and Sylvain Lefebvre); and an entire forward line (left wing Val Kamensky, center Tim Taylor and right wing Theo Fleury) — upon urging from ownership.
The next thing you knew, ownership was urging Smith to leave his keys to the Garden’s executive washroom on the table a week or so before the end of the 1999-2000 season.
The Devils finished ahead of the Rangers in the standings for 11 straight seasons beginning with 1996-97. The names on the backs of the New Jersey uniforms were familiar — Brodeur, Stevens, Niedermayer, Daneyko, Elias, Rafalski, Madden, Parise — even as the Blueshirts kept mixing and matching.
But now the Rangers have finished ahead of the Devils for three straight seasons, the longest stretch of superiority in more than two decades, since a four-year Blueshirts run ended in 1991-92.
And now, it’s the Rangers who have built their foundation on home-grown talent while the Devils have been relegated to shopping in bulk, entering Tuesday night’s game at the Garden as a patchwork operation reliant on 41-year-old Jaromir Jagr to carry the load almost as much as the Blueshirts depended upon No. 68 the middle of the last decade.
There is of course Brodeur, as it seems there will always be Brodeur in net for the Devils — as it seemed there always would be Mariano Rivera closing for the Yankees — but then there’s Jagr and Michael Ryder and Damien Brunner and Andrei Loktionov and Anton Volchenkov, and come on, is this any way to keep the line moving?
The perception is the trade for Rick Nash signaled a change in the Rangers’ philosophy of building from within. But not true. The deal for Nash, who skated for the fourth straight day on Tuesday morning and is making sure and steady progress toward returning from the concussion that has sidelined him since Oct. 8, was a move designed to put the finishing touch — in more ways than one — on a club with a home-grown foundation.
Sending Brandon Dubinsky and Artem Anisimov to Columbus in the deal for No. 61 was a move out of the Lamoriello playbook, similar in structure to the trade in which the Devils dispatched young projected staples Denis Pederson and Brendan Morrison to Vancouver for Mogilny in 2000.
There’s mixed blood in the Blueshirts’ lineup now with the infusion from Columbus in the Marian Gaborik exchange last April, but the base bleeds Blue. Fact is, Henrik Lundqvist, Dan Girardi, Ryan McDonagh, Marc Staal, Ryan Callahan, Derek Stepan, Carl Hagelin, Chris Kreider, Michael Del Zotto, Mats Zuccarello and J.T. Miller have never played for any other NHL team.
Maybe one day the Devils will replenish. Maybe the pipeline to Newark will start gushing once again. For now though, the Rangers are the team tending its garden.