New York Islanders, New York Rangers Deliver A Worthy Preview Of A Possible Postseason Series

The New York hockey scene was buzzing through portions of Saturday afternoon with the idea of Rangers-Islanders postseason series becoming a possibility.

For all the talk about a rivalry, the teams have not met in the postseason since 1994, a year to remember for the rangers and a year that begat several forgettable seasons for the Islanders, who dealt with some forgettable moments in their ownership situation before Charles Wang swooped in to buy the team in 2001.

Since the NHL lockout of 2004 canceled that season and ushered in a new era of salary caps and shootouts to end ties, the Rangers and Islanders have seen their peaks of regular-season success differ.

From 2006 through 2017, the Rangers made the playoffs in all but one season and the one year they missed was 2010 when they lost the final game in a shootout in Philadelphia. In that same span, the Islanders made four playoff appearances as they transitioned from a veteran team to a young core built around John Tavares, who in 2016 eventually helped the Islanders win their first postseason series since David Volek’s overtime winner in Game 7 of the second round in Pittsburgh on May 14, 1993.

“It was a great atmosphere,” said Brock Nelson, who scored twice and seemingly had the Islanders four-plus minutes away from a regulation win that would have made a series between the two teams even more likely “A lot on the line for both teams and we knew the intensity would be high having played them twice in a short span. We’re fighting for every point we can get. We’d like to close that one out and get two but it’s a big point right now for us.”

At the same time as the Tavares era was cresting for the Islanders, the Rangers were winding down a successful era and starting a rebuild that seemed to accelerate with the signing of Artemi Panarin in 2019, who might be the most dynamic player in the New York hockey scene.

At the same time, the Islanders ascended to the cusp of being Stanley Cup final participants, reaching the conference finals in 2020 and 2021 only to run into a seven-game series with the eventual champion Tampa Bay Lightning, who eked through the series with a 2-1 overtime win in 2020 and a 1-0 win the following year.

In 2022, it was the Rangers who ascended to 52 wins and a surprising run to the conference finals against the same Lightning. They outlasted Pittsburgh and Carolina in seven-game series, won the first two games against Tampa Bay and did not win again.

After a disappointing follow-up, the Rangers reached the last weekend of this season with a President’s Trophy in play along with the division title and in theory as good of a chance as any at getting through to the Stanley Cup final, though they did not look that way until the third period against the Islanders.

Panarin’s fingerprints were all over the events of Saturday. First he scored the tying goal on a blistering wrist shot off a faceoff win with about four minutes left in the third and then scored the first of two shootout goals.

“He’s a guy that we look to in those moments,” Trocheck said. “He came through again, and I don’t think anybody is surprised.”

Panarin’s clutch performance made the possibility of Rangers-Islanders slightly less unlikely because a win on Monday secures a division title and the Islanders seemingly are locked into third place in the division thanks to a six-game winning streak built mostly on even strength goals and not on a power play with two goals in 19 chances in the last seven games.

“It’s a pretty good rivalry,” goalie Igor Shesterkin said after denying Brock Nelson in the shootout and stopping Mathew Barzal in the waning seconds of overtime. “They have a really good team. A very good defensive team, blocking a lot of shots. They play smart hockey so they’re tough to play against.”

The Rangers learned firsthand, allowing two goals near the crease and rarely getting consistent scoring chances other than the occasional odd-man rush. The Rangers made plenty of passes on power plays but seldom found any room to score until Panarin came through with the biggest equalizer to date for the Rangers, who were four minutes away from a three-game regulation losing skid.

“I think our team is doing a pretty good job in third periods this year,” Panarin said. “It’s not always worked. But tonight it worked again.

“Never give up.”

And if the circumstances dictate it, one of these teams will get a chance to say similar things four times, unless the possible series turns out to be copy of the 1994 four-game domination by the Rangers.