“We want more.’’
Those words came from Devils captain Nico Hischier in the immediate aftermath of his team’s 4-0 rout of the Rangers in Game 7 of their first-round playoff series Monday night at Prudential Center.
Well Nico, the Devils might just get more.
Potentially a lot more.
Ask any NHL team still standing in these Stanley Cup playoffs which remaining team it would least want to face, and chances are the answer is the Devils.
The Devils are dangerous, because they’re skilled, young, fast and fearless.
They, too, are gaining more confidence by the shift in these playoffs, something the Rangers felt on the ice in the last five games of their series after they’d taken a 2-0 series lead by a combined 10-2 goals margin.
The Devils also have discovered the almighty Stanley Cup playoffs elixir: the hot goaltender.
Akira Schmid, the 22-year-old rookie netminder from Switzerland who was playing minor league hockey earlier this season, is 4-1 with a 1.38 goals-against average and a .951 save percentage since he was inserted in favor of starter Vitek Vanecek after the Devils went down 0-2 to the Rangers.
Schmid has his team believing, and why not?
“Stone-cold ‘Schmido,’ he stood tall,’’ Devils winger Tomas Tatar said.
“He’s a big part of why we won the series,’’ fellow winger Ondrej Palat said.
“The biggest thing was ‘Schmido’ — he came in and played unreal, he was a brick wall for us,’’ Devils star center Jack Hughes said.
“You envision things, but you don’t ever really envision what he did,’’ Devils coach Lindy Ruff said. “He played a heck of a game; he had a heck of a series.’’
Ruff made a heck of a decision to bench his starter for a goalie who was playing in Utica for the franchise’s farm team earlier this season and had never been in a playoff game.
That decision, which felt like a desperate last-call, phone-a-friend move in the moment on the part of Ruff, changed the series, and perhaps the entire postseason for the Devils. They now march on to play the Carolina Hurricanes, who staved off a late-season New Jersey charge and nipped them by one point to win the Metropolitan Division, in the second round.
The teams split the regular-season series, 2-2.
But this is a different Devils team than the one that played Carolina in the regular season. This is a highly confident team that has found its playoff legs (and nerve) and is hungry for much more.
And there’s much more out there for them, with the Eastern Conference door to the Stanley Cup Final swung wide open thanks to the 65-win, 135-point Bruins falling to the Florida Panthers, a team that barely scraped its way into the playoff tournament.
With the record-setting Bruins having the dominant season they had, there was a consensus that no team was going to get past Boston to the Cup Final.
So, why not the Devils?
“It’s a big opportunity for us,’’ Hughes said. “We have a lot of belief. We’ve had a really good year, were one of the top teams in the league, so it’s definitely a big moment and we’d love for our season to keep going on.’’
The Devils’ season continues to advance because of their rapid growth spurt in the Rangers series.
“The series has been great for our group,’’ Devils wing Erik Haula said. “We’re going through it together. We’ve gotten better. We’ve taken huge steps. I go back that Game 3 and the steps that we were able to take and the way we won that game.
“I think we grew a lot as a team from that. It’s a different storyline if we win that game 5-0. [The Rangers] played one of their better games in Game 3. That was a tight battle, a tough game, and we needed to give everything we had to win that game.’’
The Devils, staring at an insurmountable 0-3 hole had they lost Game 3, won that game, 2-1 in overtime.
That game changed everything. It liberated a team that looked timid in the first two games in its own building.
“Just to see the team grow from the losses we had in Games 1 and 2, it was pretty impressive how quick we adapted and changed our game a little bit,” Palat said. “I’m very impressed with how our team responded. We never gave up.”
Hughes heard the noise after Game 2, and he ignored it.
“People wrote us out and we just continued to climb out of the hole we dug ourselves in, and we did a great job, and now we’re a really confident group and we’re really excited we’re going to Round 2,’’ Hughes said.
“I’m really happy right now,” Hischier said. “To beat the Rangers in a Game 7 at home … I think those are memories that are going to stick forever. But it’s just the first round. We believe in each other and we want more.’’
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