Stanley Cup was left without the most Russian clubs – Kommersant

The opening round of the play-off championship of the NHL was crowned by another collapse of the club, which looked like his favorite. Possessing a chic in terms of talent and experience, the New York Rangers did not cope with the daring New Jersey Devils and their young goaltender-“Joker” Akira Schmid, losing in the seventh, decisive game of the series on someone else’s court – 0:4 . The defeat of the New Yorkers, which included three famous Russian hockey players – Artemy Panarin, Igor Shesterkin and Vladimir Tarasenko – made the “Russian presence” in the current Stanley Cup extremely modest.

Formally, the departure of the New York Rangers is not as high-profile as the two that happened the day before, when the Florida Panthers and the Seattle Cracken defeated the regular season winner Boston Bruins and last year’s Stanley Cup winner Colorado Avalanche in seven games. “. Moreover, the New Yorkers, unlike the other two giants cut off, in the playoffs were seeded even slightly lower than their opponent. But in fact, in this case, too, we are talking about an extremely extraordinary incident.

The fact is that the Rangers seemed to be a club ideally suited to storm the Stanley Cup.

And so a good foundation at the end of winter, before the entry into force of the ban on exchanges, he strengthened with two excellent forwards who know how to take the trophy – Vladimir Tarasenko and Patrick Kane. None of the clubs in the NHL so clearly defined their ambitions.

As a result, the composition of the Rangers turned out to be such that it is simply impossible to find fault with it. At the gate – the best goalkeeper of the league of the previous season, Igor Shesterkin. The defense is even, with a chic defender-playmaker Adam Fox. In attack there are four simply strong ones, if you take names, or very, very strong links, a whole group of diverse stars and stars – Artemy Panarin and Mika Zibanejad, Chris Kreider and Vladimir Tarasenko, Patrick Kane and Vincent Trochek, Alexis Lafrenière and Kaapo Kakko. Someone is great at throwing, someone is great at giving back, someone is great at playing on the pitch and at the boards. No, at first glance, gaps. And these hockey players, sharpened for big victories, are opposed by a terribly pretty, fast, but still seemingly damp team, which recently was a hopeless middle peasant among those closer to outsiders, and did not go beyond the first stage of the play-off for more than ten years.

And the most surprising thing is that the beginning of the series fully confirmed the forecasts. The Rangers finished off the opponent twice in a row – away with the same score 5:1. These matches did not leave any doubts about who will go further here. But then everything suddenly changed.

New Yorkers coach Gerard Gallant may have summed up his team’s failure perfectly when he said after the streak ended that “talent doesn’t solve anything – you have to play together and work together.”

He, of course, did not go into details, did not go into names, but everything was clear enough. Play-offs are the time when everyone is obliged to give the maximum and even beyond it, the time of obligatory feats. At the Rangers, after two devastating victories, those who were supposed to ensure the result, with the exception of Shesterkin, who continued to help out, went into the shadows. And, for example, in the assets of Panarin, the club’s top scorer in the regular season, by the end of the series, only two points remained, scored in the first match.

New Jersey, on the other hand, reacted to the breakdown perfectly – rebuilding in every sense, becoming tougher, more accurate and finding its unexpected hero. In the third meeting, Akira Schmid, a newcomer in whom it was impossible to discern a superman, stood in his gate instead of the floating Vitek Vanechek. But he played exactly like Superman. Having failed to bail out in the sixth game (in which the Rangers prevailed – 5: 2), in the other four Schmid conceded a total of two goals, and twice did not concede anything at all, including the seventh match, which gave a couple more details that extremely accurately describe why New Jersey achieved a turning point and put the squeeze on the opponent.

In play-off matches between equal teams, episodes with the collapse of templates often become key. The Rangers had almost no such in the series. New Jersey opened the scoring in its final game when a shorthanded Ondřej Palat entered a seemingly hopeless fight for the puck in someone else’s zone, took it from Fox and Kreider, and then rewarded Michael McLeod with a chic pass. And the second goal, which apparently finished off the New Yorkers, was the result of a solo pass by John Marino, a defender who practically did not join the attacks, who, unable to cope with Shesterkin, did not turn off, but was able to lead Tomasz Tatar to a killer throw.

The loss of the Rangers also meant that for the first time in many years, the “Russian presence” in the main stages of the playoffs would be very modest.

The fact is that from the battle for the Stanley Cup managed to leave all clubs strongly associated with domestic hockey players. Back in the regular season, the Washington Capitals of Alexander Ovechkin with Evgeny Kuznetsov and the Pittsburgh Penguins of Evgeny Malkin, and in the starting round of the play-offs, the sad fate of the New Yorkers was shared by the participant of the three finals of the three previous Tampa Bay Lightning draws Nikita Kucherov, Andrey Vasilevsky and Mikhail Sergachev and Kirill Kaprizov’s Minnesota Wild, who failed to cope with the Toronto Maple Leafs and Dallas Stars. Although most of the surviving prize hunters still have players from Russia.

In the quarterfinal playoff series, New Jersey will meet the Carolina Hurricanes, Florida the Toronto, Seattle the Dallas, and the Vegas Golden Knights the Edmonton Oilers.

Alexey Dospekhov