WASHINGTON — I walked into the cramped visitors’ locker room following Friday morning’s optional skate hours in advance of this Rangers-Caps Game 3 and my mind’s eye saw Chris Drury sitting in the first stall to the right.
I wasn’t envisioning Drury, the club’s current general manager. Instead, I was envisioning Drury, No. 23 and the club’s captain in 2011, talking softly to me, head bowed, after the Rangers’ five-game, first-round elimination to the Caps. That turned out to be the final game of Drury’s NHL career.
I walked deeper into the room and when K’Andre Miller plunked himself down in the middle of the row to the left, my mind’s eye saw Ryan McDonagh, hunched over and exhausted after getting 53:17 of ice time in the Blueshirts’ triple-overtime Game 3 victory in 2012 on Marian Gaborik’s goal.
Alexander Wennberg moved to his spot at the back row after skating following Thursday’s day of maintenance and I remembered a conversation in that same vicinity with Rick Nash in 2013 about the need to get to the inside after three games here in which his team had scored a sum of two goals.
(They got to the inside well enough in the fourth and final game in the capital — Game 7 of the first round — to record a 5-0 rout and move onto Round 2.)
And, as I watched a dozen or so guys skate and take shots on Friday, I took a gander 15 years back into the stands behind the Blueshirts bench, where one-time head coach John Tortorella tossed a water bottle at an aggravating fan in the third period of Game 5 of the 2009 first round.
Tortorella was suspended for Game 6. The Blueshirts, who had shockingly taken a 3-1 lead in the series in which they were the underdog in a 2-7 matchup, lost Games 5, 6 and 7, to drop the series.
Rangers-Caps was a rite of spring passage from 2009-15, the clubs hooking up five times in seven years and four times in five years from 2011-15. The Caps took the first two of those matchups, the Rangers took the final three, all of them coming in seven games.
Chris Kreider was on the scene for the 2012 second-round matchup as a 19-year-old about to turn 20 after having made his pro and NHL debut a round earlier against Ottawa in the wake of leading Boston College to the NCAA title as a junior. He got 26:17 of ice time in the triple-overtime contest. He got 7:34 the next game and 6:57 the game after that. Of course he did.
“I was 19, 20, 21, and in those early years I was just trying my best not to f— up,” Kreider, who will turn 33 Tuesday, said. “So it’s hard for me to compare scenarios between the teams I came up with and this one.
“I just have a completely different perspective from then to now. I mean it, I just didn’t want to get in the way on those teams.”
The Rangers went 5-12 in 17 games here across those five series. They avoided elimination twice, first in that 2013 Game 7 rout and then in Game 6 of 2015 when the Blueshirts rallied from a 3-1 series deficit to win the round on Derek Stepan’s overtime goal in Game 7.
That was the series in which the Rangers were down 1-0 in a potential elimination Game 5 at the Garden until Kreider tied it on a drive from the left circle with 101 seconds remaining in the season. McDonagh won it in overtime.
Kreider then scored twice in the first period of Game 6 here to give his team a 2-0 lead in a match that the Blueshirts would win 4-3 after being out-attempted by an Islanders-esque 32-0 over the final 14:14 of the third period. Kreider scored in the first minute on a power move down the right side and in the final second on a power-play rebound from just outside the crease.
Nine years later and some things do not change, do they?
Friday’s match represented the 20th of Kreider’s playoff career against the Caps. He’d recorded six goals and three assists while playing for teams that won all three series matchups. This, though, was a new team, and presented a new opportunity for a team with a 2-0 lead.
“Twelve years was a long time ago and so was 2015,” Kreider said. “You can think about those things. I’m thinking about this game.”
