NEWARK — Ryan Graves, the New Jersey Devils’ sturdy defenseman, was one of many players who felt Thursday night’s game against the Rangers was a preview of the intensity of the playoffs — and rightly so.
With only seven games left in the regular season, the Devils are 4 points ahead of the Rangers. If the playoffs started today, those old rivals would be paired up in the first round, a daring matchup that would open the postseason with a zing. If it materialized, the combination could make Thursday’s game, which the Devils won 2-1, feel like a morning skate by comparison.
“There’s no bad blood yet,” Graves said. “We’re not in Game 3 of the series yet.”
For some, it’s both fun and nerve-wracking to think about what such a matchup would look like. The teams have faced each other six times in the playoffs, including several close series over the years. The 1994 conference finals, which the Rangers won Stephane Matteau’s Game 7 overtime goal, was one of the most memorable series ever. But Devils fans retaliated, both by seeing their team win three Stanley Cups over the Rangers in that span and, more recently, by beating the Rangers head-to-head in the 2012 Conference Finals, which the Devils won at the overtime goal by Adam Henrique in Game 6.
When the teams meet again this year, it will be a battle between two evenly matched, high-quality squads.
The Rangers, recently traded for Patrick Kane and Vladimir Tarasenko – a pair of powerful offensive stars, each with a Stanley Cup-winning resume – have deadly marksmen scattered across the ice and a world-class goalie in Igor Shesterkin. They want to improve on last year’s run to the Eastern Conference Finals.
The Devils are looking to build on their surprisingly successful season by leveraging all the young speed and talent that have blossomed a little ahead of schedule. They too have a goalkeeper, Vitek Vanecek, who has been a source of confidence and stability.
“A really good team gets knocked out in the first round,” said Joe Aloi, 24, a Devils fan who works for the Connecticut Department of Correction.
Aloi drove three hours to Thursday’s game at Prudential Center with CJ Teto, 22, his friend and former teammate on the East Haven High School hockey team in Connecticut. Aloi was wearing his favorite Devils jersey and Teto was decked out in Rangers blue. They described the battles they had fought over the years as they watched their respective teams play. Usually it was on television, in Aloi’s basement. Occasionally, however, they also go to competitions.
Aloi admitted to being nervous about a playoff game with the Rangers, but Teto, who manages a sporting goods store in Cheshire, Connecticut, showed more bravado.
“I’m not worried at all, especially with the additions we’ve made,” Teto said. “But it’s definitely going to be a battle.”
Heading into a game against the Sabres on Friday, the Rangers have been on a rampage in recent weeks and are one win away from reaching 100 points for the second consecutive year. That comes after four years in which the team’s lone postseason berth was when it was swept in three games by the Carolina Hurricanes in the ad-hoc qualifying rounds of the 2020 pandemic postseason. New York started this season slowly as the Devils took a got off to a smashing start, only to slip back to the onrushing Rangers.
The Rangers went into Thursday’s game having won nine of their previous 11, losing one in overtime. The Devils had won only twice in their previous eight games. The gap became so small that the Rangers could have tied even with the Devils for second place in the Metropolitan Division. The devils felt the heat and reacted.
“It was a hard-fought game,” said Adam Fox, the Rangers defender. “This was an important race for us, in terms of standings. But playing against a team like Buffalo, those 2 points are just as important.”
Due to the playoff implications and home ice of Thursday’s game, both teams went hard after the 2 points, with some of the Devils’ players signaling that they wanted to set the tone for any upcoming series with the Rangers.
“That’s a good team,” said Graves. “They added pieces on deadline, big pieces, and they are better now than when we played them all year. It shows a lot that we can win a game 2-1 against such a team.”
The outcome actually added more uncertainty to the standings, and it could upset the tantalizing prospect of a Rangers-Devils first-round matchup. The Hurricanes are in first place in the Metropolitan Division, but lost to Detroit on Thursday and now the Devils are just 1 point behind. However, Carolina has an extra game in hand. If the Devils outscore Carolina and win the division, the Rangers would play the Hurricanes in the first round. If things get really crazy, the Rangers can still win the division.
Graves played in 25 postseason games, with the Colorado Avalanche before being traded to the Devils in 2021. have only made the playoffs once, in 2018, since beating the Rangers in 2012 before losing to the Los Angeles Kings in the Stanley Cup final. But this team is different from the last several teams in New Jersey.
“They have a lot of skill, a lot of talent,” said Rangers coach Gerard Gallant. “It’s a very good team. I mean, they clearly have 102 points. But they’ve taken a step, just like our young players. It’s a confident group.”
For the Devils, it was their third victory this season in four games against the Rangers. Two went to overtime and only one game, a 5–3 victory by the Devils in November, was decided by more than one goal.
As is always the case when the Rangers are at the Prudential Center, they had plenty of supporters in the building, and when Chris Kreider beat Vanecek for the Rangers’ only goal, it sounded like a home side had just scored.
It was OK for Vanecek, though. He earned the win to become the only Devils goaltender other than Hall of Famer Martin Brodeur to win 30 games in a single season for the Devils (Brodeur did it 14 times). Standing in his fold during stoppages, Vanecek took stock of his surroundings.
“I saw a lot of blue jerseys today,” he said. “It wasn’t much fun. But it’s still better with all the fans.”
If the Devils face the Rangers in the playoffs, he better get used to it.