For the players on the Rangers who were with the team a year ago, which encompasses the majority of their dressing room, the sting hasn’t fully subsided.
And it won’t. Not until more is done this month, next month and possibly in June.
The Rangers exited the Stanley Cup playoffs far too early commensurate with their expectations when they lost a 2-0 series lead and fell to the Devils in seven games in the first round last spring.
The exorcism of those demons begins Sunday afternoon at the Garden, where the Rangers will play Game 1 against a Washington Capitals team they’re expected to dispatch en route to a deeper run into these playoffs.
“Going home early, that’s obviously hard and it sits with you,” Rangers captain Jacob Trouba said. “Throughout the season you’re constantly thinking about, ‘How can I be more prepared for this moment?’ It’s been something that we’ve been working for the whole year, trying to get back to this point and prove to ourselves that we can do it.’’
In the playoffs.
There’s a 30-year Stanley Cup drought in play, and everyone associated with the Rangers hopes there’s a little bit of 1994 in the air this spring.
The Rangers did everything they needed to do in the regular season and enter the postseason as winners of the Presidents’ Trophy, having amassed 114 points and 55 wins — both franchise records. That earned them home ice for as long as they remain alive in this postseason.
The elephant on the ice here is Presidents’ Trophy pressure, and how the Rangers handle it. Hopefully from their standpoint, they handle it better than last year’s Bruins, who amassed 135 points — the most of any team to win the Presidents’ Trophy since its inception in 1985-86 — and were bounced from the playoffs in the first round by the Florida Panthers.
The Presidents’ Trophy pressure is real. Winning it allows no assurance for playoff success. Of the 37 teams that have won it, only eight went on to win the Stanley Cup with three more losing in the finals.
The last team to win the Presidents’ Trophy and the Stanley Cup in the same season was the 2012-13 Chicago Blackhawks. The last team to win the Presidents’ Trophy and advance further than the first two rounds of the playoffs was the 2014-15 Rangers, who lost in the conference finals.
The Capitals got into the playoffs in the 11th hour thanks to winning four of their last five games. Despite being in a rebuilding mode, they still have past champions on their roster, beginning with Alex Ovechkin, one of the all-time snipers. The Capitals, who split four games with the Rangers this season, are also a dangerous opponent because they have nothing to lose.
This is why Rangers center Mika Zibanejad on Friday after practice said, “You have to try to manage” the pressure that comes with being the top-seeded team playing against the lowest seed.
“There’s going to be times in the series when things aren’t going well for you and we just have to remember what we’ve done and what makes us successful and trust ourselves and trust what we’ve been doing,” Zibanejad said.
There are many reasons to believe that the Rangers will do just that, beginning with the fact that they’re a better, more talented, deeper team than Washington.
Beyond that obvious fact, though, the way the Rangers players grinded to the end of the regular season to secure that Presidents’ Trophy should bode well that there’ll be no let-up in this playoff series.
“They were playing some desperate hockey towards he the [of the regular season] and were able to win some big games,” Rangers defenseman Ryan Lindgren said of the Capitals. “But we were fighting for everything, too, right down to the final game. We were trying to play the best hockey we possibly could, so every point mattered to us. That definitely should help.”
It should.
So, too, should the presence of their coach, Peter Laviolette, who’s in his first year with the team and has made a difference. Laviolette did a brilliant job of keeping his players motivated and hungry — even long after they’d clinched a playoff berth and could have cruised into the postseason.
“Any team that gets in, they’re capable — us, them, anybody,” Laviolette said. “I’ve seen top teams win and last guys in the door win, as well. You’ve got to play well when the puck drops.”
Laviolette said “not for a second” has he spoken to the players about last season’s early playoff exit. “That’s last year and not for me to speak about,” he said.
He prefers to lean on what’s been done to date this season, which is put together the finest regular season in the league.
“I think you can take a little bit of confidence from that, but at the end of the day that’s not what you should be relying on,” Laviolette said. “You should be relying on the work that you put in and making sure the work matches the game plan when the puck drops for Game 1.”
