PITTSBURGH – The Rangers had better be careful now that they’ve gotten what they wished for – a first-round matchup with the Thrashers rather than one with the Devils.
The back door had a southern exposure. Even though the Rangers lost their game here last night to the Penguins when a victory would have clinched sixth place and the match with Atlanta, the Blueshirts claimed the six-seed anyway when, ironically enough, the Thrashers themselves defeated the Lightning 3-2 in a shootout match to keep Tampa Bay in seventh.
Or maybe that wasn’t irony at all. Maybe that was Atlanta – which rallied from a 2-0 regulation hole and then from a 1-0 last at-bat deficit in the shootout – choosing to face the Rangers rather than Tampa Bay.
Actually then, the Rangers and Thrashers chose one another. The series will begin this week – probably Thursday – in Atlanta after the Blueshirts’ 2-1 defeat last night in which the team was unable to muster the necessary intensity to compete over 60 minutes on a shift-in, shift-out basis after six weeks of pedal-to-the-metal hockey necessary to clinch a playoff spot.
The Rangers, who went 1-1-2 against the Thrashers during the season, did elevate their game in the third, scoring early to climb within 2-1 before pressing late to earn sixth place on the ice. But even as their fifth straight unsuccessful power play ended in futility with 3:35 to play, the Thrashers’ Kari Lehtonen was stopping Eric Perrin to give the Rangers sixth place, after all.
“We wanted to win this game but after the last two months of stress, this game was a little bit of a relief before it all starts again,” Jaromir Jagr said. “It hasn’t been easy. Physically it’s OK, but mentally it just kills you.
“Even if we wanted to play better than we did tonight, we just couldn’t, not with the way we’d been fighting for our lives. But I don’t think it matters how it wound up that we finished sixth because it’s not tonight that put us there. “It was all year.”
It was, more to the point, the team’s work from the Feb. 27 trade deadline through Thursday, a period in which the Rangers went 13-2-4 to clinch a playoff berth in Game 81.
“This is what it’s all about, obviously,” said Sean Avery, whose Feb. 5 acquisition from a Los Angeles team going nowhere was the catalytic event in propelling the Rangers somewhere. “I’m really excited about the way things went for me, no question, but more so that I proved to myself that I could play at a high level.
“Now that I’ve done that, I have to take it to the next level and help the team in the playoffs.”
The Rangers were unaware that they’d finished sixth until they convened in the locker room following the defeat. They did not appear to do any celebrating over having escaped a second straight opening round Battle of the Hudson.
“I don’t know if it matters,” Jagr said. “The Devils are a good team and Atlanta is a good team.”
It wouldnt have been easy facing Martin Brodeur, Scott Gomez, Jamie Langenbrunner and Zach Parise and it won’t be easy facing Marian Hossa, Ilya Kovalchuk, Bobby Holik and Keith Tkachuk.
But this much seems true – the Rangers and Thrashers chose each other.
Penguins 2 Rangers 1