BOSTON — It’s happened three times since World War II –three times since World War II that the Rangers failed to make the playoffs when holding a spot with five or fewer games to go in a season.
Each of those times the Rangers were eliminated on the final night of the season, twice even though winning their season finales in a pair of too-little-too-late scenarios in 1950-51 and 1987-88, once losing it to fall out of the playoffs as the culmination of a late-season collapse in 1958-59.
The Rangers were in that position again, holding the seventh playoff spot with five games left. The Canadiens and Panthers are nipping at their heels as the season winds down, and the Blueshirts want to avoid letting the postseason position this late for just the fourth time since World War II.
The 1950-51 Rangers were in a comfortable spot with eight games remaining, holding a seven-point lead over the fifth-place Bruins in the Original Six era, in which the top four teams qualified for the playoffs. But the Rangers proceeded to go 1-5-1 in their next seven, and the Bruins went 5-1-1 to move one point ahead of the Blueshirts with one game to go. And when Boston won its season finale against Toronto, the Rangers’ victory over Chicago on the final night of the season was rendered meaningless.
Eight years later, the Rangers collapsed again, this time falling out of the playoffs despite holding a seven-point lead on the Maple Leafs with six games remaining in the season to Toronto’s five.
The slide was punctuated by the Maple Leafs sweeping a home-and-home from the Blueshirts on the season’s penultimate weekend. It also was marked by the Rangers’ ineffectual protest of the Canadiens’ controversial decision to start nondescript minor league goaltender Claude Pronovost instead of highly regarded prospect Charlie Hodge against Toronto in the third-to-last game of the year.
The Maple Leafs routed Pronovost to move within one point of the Rangers. When the Rangers lost at home to the Canadiens and Hodge at the Garden on the final night of the season, they slipped out of the playoffs when the Maple Leafs won in Detroit.
The 1987-88 Rangers did not collapse down the stretch, yet they were caught and passed on the final weekend by the Devils, who went 7-0-1 while the Blueshirts went 4-2-2.
That was the year in which John MacLean’s overtime goal in Chicago on the final night of the season boosted the Devils — coached by current Rangers’ assistant GM and assistant coach Jim Schoenfeld — into the playoffs for the first time in their history. That’s while the Blueshirts watched their fate decided on televisions in the Garden after they had defeated the Nordiques to keep their hopes alive.