THIS is what I want to know. How did the Rangers go 7-0-1 against the Devils during the regular-season in winning the series on points 15-5, yet still manage to finish behind New Jersey (by two points) for the 11th straight year?
Say what you want. The Rangers were supposed to be better than they were this season after a July in which they added two blue-chip free agent centers in Chris Drury and Scott Gomez, and the Devils were expected to be worse than they were after another summer in which they lost more of their talent to free agency, this time Gomez and Brian Rafalski.
The Devils have one difficult post-lockout off-season after another, but then they sure don’t seem to translate into off seasons, do they? Or was this one, in which after playing their opening nine games on the road, they could only come up with 99 points and a second-place finish in the Atlantic?
Brendan Shanahan, who’s been in a few more locker rooms than I, said yesterday that he believes the Rangers grew as a team this season. He believes that lessons learned in last year’s Buffalo series will prove critical both in this Battle of the Hudson that opens tonight at the Rock and as the tournament evolves.
Call it his, “7.7 second theory.”
“There’s a very fine line between desperation and panic,” said Shanahan, a three-time Cup winner with Detroit who has played 167 post-season games. “There’s nothing wrong with a team playing desperate hockey but I’ve never really seen panic work, and that’s what we did last year when Chris [Drury] scored with [7.7] seconds to go to tie Game 5.
“I think we learned from that. I think when we face adversity this year, we’re going to be a poised unit. It remains to be seen, but I don’t think we’ll go off the page this time when we fall behind and something adverse happens.”
Maybe. But the Rangers didn’t play especially well the final five weeks, even while accumulating extra points with victories in the four-on-four overtime and shootout formats that don’t exist in the playoffs.
Gomez hasn’t been the same since injuring his ribs almost three weeks ago. Sean Avery hasn’t been the same since being taken off Jaromir Jagr’s line. Shanahan hasn’t been quite the same since, well, maybe since sustaining his concussion in February of 2007. Martin Straka hasn’t been the same all season, and neither has Michal Rozsival.
The Devils aren’t the same, either. This is not the lockdown team of the Exit of Champions. They surrender third-period leads. They don’t have a legitimate first-line center, though Patrik Elias, playing out of position in the middle, is as outstanding a big-game player as there’s been in the league this decade.
The Rangers have Jagr, primed to double-shift and dominate whomever the Devils throw at him for 25 minutes a night for as many nights as it takes. They have Drury. They have Henrik Lundqvist, playing as well as he ever has in the NHL.
But the Devils have their pedigree. They have John Madden. They have seven multiple Cup winners. They have Martin Brodeur, who can walk down the street and have people say, “There goes the greatest who ever lived.”
It’s hard to imagine how the Devils finished ahead of the Rangers again this season. It’s not so hard to imagine the Devils winning this series. I think they will, in six.