New York Magazine

The Devils deserved this. They were the better team in this series — sometimes by a large margin — and they earned the right to represent the Eastern Conference in the Stanley Cup Finals. We watched this Rangers team earn the conference's top playoff seed, then fight like hell to get past the postseason's first two rounds, but they met their match in the Eastern Conference Finals. Tonight's Game 6 looked for a while like it might turn into a blowout, but it ultimately became yet another stressful game, regardless of which team you root for. And so a contest that was tied through two periods remained tied through three, as if 60 minutes of this wasn't agonizing enough, particularly if you were pulling for the team that had been pushed to the brink of elimination on Wednesday night. We suppose, from a Rangers-fan point of view, if the Devils had to win this game with a sudden-death goal, better they do it right away, rather than prolonging things for an overtime or two. But there's no painless way to lose a game like this, or a series like this.

Is there a Ranger whose season will be evaluated based on his performance in the playoffs more than Brad Richards? He's capable of a bigger regular season than the one he turned in — it was only the third time since 2002-03 that he failed to reach 70 points — but he also tied for fifth in the league with nine game-winning goals. All told, not an All-Star worthy campaign, but good enough to avoid any significant backlash from fans. And anyway, if one was to assign Brad Richards a grade at the end of the regular season, it would have been an "Incomplete." The Rangers went hard after Richards on the free-agent market over the summer, and the line on his résumé that reads "Conn Smythe Winner" was a big reason why. It's in the playoffs when Richards can really earn that huge contract.

Rangers fans have surely encountered a lot of references to 1994 in recent weeks. (Why, there's one on the back page of the Post just this morning.) There are a couple of reasons for this: This is their best shot at a title since that season, and it's also the sort of thing that writers who don't often cover hockey — the Mike Lupicas of the world — can easily reference. (Ian O'Connor, for instance, has written three articles on the Rangers during the Eastern Conference Finals and has included a reference to Stephane Matteau in two of them.)