The Rangers will want to take in the emotions they gained from this game and do their best in the playoffs later this month.
Is there anything that gets your heart racing and your blood flowing more than Wednesday night’s emotional 4-3 victory over the Devils at Madison Square Garden? In this game, the Blueshirts took a two-goal lead and rallied for the win with the third goal. It started with an opening faceoff and a 5-on-5 line brawl.
The Rangers weathered the ups and downs of this matchup in a way that will benefit them this postseason.
“I’ve never seen anything like that, and I don’t know if it’s ever happened,” Chris Crider said. He had a mixed performance before finally scoring the winning goal at 15:03 of the final frame. He put his stick on Adam Fox’s shot from the top of the zone. “It’s just a strange dynamic to have 80 percent of them walk you through the gate.”
As the fourth line is deployed to begin the fourth and final meeting of the season, with Rangers face-puncher Matt Lempe on one side and Devils enforcer Curtis McDiarmid on the other, the surrounding chaos looms large. In this scene, everyone was paired up and dropped their gloves on the ice in the center.
Rempe was at the center of the feud. Rempe will finally face McDiarmid after the 6-foot-8 forward was sent off in each of the previous two contests between the teams (and subsequently served a four-game suspension the second time). Agreed. A hit that knocks out a Devils player for a long time.
Jimmy Vesey fought Curtis Lazar.
Quandre Miller faced off against John Marino.
Barclay Goodrow dropped the gloves with Kevin Bahr.
Captain Jacob Trouba took on it with Chris Tierney.
Vesey and Lazar were the first to engage, causing everyone else to suffer game cheating in secondary combat. As such, the Rangers were forced to play virtually the entire game without Trouba, Miller, Rempe, and Goodrow, while the Devils had to continue without McDiarmid, Marino, Barr, and Tiny.
Judging by the appearance of Peter Laviolette getting into an altercation with Devils interim coach Travis Green in the aftermath of the melee, the Rangers head coach likely had two of his top defensemen and two forwards involved in such a prank. I guess he didn’t mean to lose it.
“Our players were reacting to what was happening on the ice,” Laviolette said, but said he had no idea a line scuffle would occur. “I thought they did a great job. All five of them.”
The Rangers seemed excited by the commotion, but ended up holding the Devils to just four shots in the first 20 minutes and taking a 2-0 lead on goals from Artemi Panarin and Alexis Lafreniere.
However, the Rangers conceded the lead just as quickly as they built it.
The Devils emerged from the first intermission with purpose, scoring three straight points by 11:24 of the second period to take their first lead of the night.
Poor D-zone coverage led to the first two Devils goals by Ondrej Palat and Brendan Smith. Kreider then mishandled the puck backwards and onto Jesper Bratt’s stick, feeding forward Nico Hischier to make it 3-2.
“I had the Foxy at full throttle and it rolled onto me,” Crider told the Post. “Instead of going parallel, I pulled the puck back and almost put the puck on the tape and put the D in a bad position.”
Kaapo Kakko then tied it at three-all just over five minutes into the third period, keeping the Rangers in the game. That’s when the Finnish wing took advantage of Luke Hughes’ broken stick and buried the puck on a contested breakaway.
Laviolette liked the team’s cohesiveness this time around.
“The guys on the ice in the third period fought hard for the guys that fought early,” he said.
These are the makings of a playoff team.
