Replay of the Day: They did it again, only they upped the ante.
The Madison Square Garden rumble staged between the New York Rangers and New Jersey Devils off the game’s opening draw tasted like déjà vu on steroids.
The bitter relationship between the combatants of the Atlantic – the best division in the NHL – has intensified as the teams have faced off four times in the last month and a half, and the playoff-bound Devils have raised their game as the season has progressed.
So to begin Monday night’s tilt, three pairs of players dropped their mitts at the three-second mark.
On either side of the centre-ice faceoff circle, New Jersey’s Cam Janssen and Eric Boulton dueled New York’s Brandon Prust and Mike Rupp. And inside the Devils’ zone, Rangers defenceman Stu Bickel swapped blows with Ryan Carter. Carter got in the better shots, but fell to the ice first and was already bleeding when he went down. It got worse when Bickel fell onto him and delivered more shots that splattered blood on the ice. Jersey’s Bryce Salvador jumped in to yank Bickle off of his teammate.
Play was delayed until the blood was scraped off the ice.
All six scrappers were dealt five-minute fighting majors, and Salvador was given a 10-minute game misconduct. Forty penalty minutes handed out in three seconds of game play. An additional four penalties were taken in the first frame.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Rangers netminder Henrik Lundqvist told reporters after the game. “We were pretty fired up going out when Torts saw their starting lineup. He changed a little bit on our starting lineup, and I think guys were ready to go out there.”
Though surely ratcheted up a notch, this is nothing new in the Devils-Rangers 2011-12 saga.
On Dec. 20, Rupp and Janssen dropped the gloves three seconds into the contest.
On Feb. 7 at MSG, two sets of Rangers and Devils immediately squared off to fight as soon as the puck dropped to begin the first period. That night it was the Rangers’ Rupp vs. the Devils’ Janssen (again) and the Rangers’ Prust vs. the Devils’ Boulton.
Besides the Hudson River divisional rivals’ general distain for one another, the double scrap occurred because on Jan. 31, Boulton slashed Rupp’s thumb and reportedly broke it. (Though Boulton was not penalized on that play, he did receive a $2,500 fine from the league.)
