Now, even with his focus on his own club’s series against Carolina, he can marvel at all the local teams playing at once.
“It’s a special thing to have everyone involved,” he said. “It doesn’t happen too often.”
Through Saturday, there will have been more than 120,000 total fans at the games. One of them is Lucas Whitehead, 27, from Saskatchewan, Canada, who was in the area to attend a conference at the United Nations on Indigenous governance. He bought an Islanders jersey and marveled at the atmosphere of the UBS Arena’s first playoff game.
“The energy in here was like nothing I’ve seen before,” he said after Friday’s game. “I’ve been to a lot of arenas. We went to M.S.G. and the Prudential Center, and I’ve been to a lot in Canada. This was the craziest.”
But the Garden was poised to come to life again on Saturday, for the Rangers-Devils game. The Rangers fans made their presence felt in Newark, but at home, when their team scores and the crowd sings their goal song and the walls vibrate, it can create a swell of momentum for the team.
“It’s amazing — it’s one of the cooler experiences you’ll have,” Mika Zibanejad, the Rangers center, said after practice on Friday, about two hours after the Knicks practiced at the same building in Westchester County. “It’s hard to explain it to someone who’s not on the ice and doesn’t get to be part of it in that moment.”
As the playoffs move into May, the number of local teams will dwindle. But there could be even more excitement ahead. If the Rangers and Islanders win their series, the two rivals, whose fan bases generally loathe each other, would meet in the second round, their first postseason encounter since the Rangers swept the Islanders in that fateful spring of ’94.
That would suit Filip Chytil, the Rangers center who is originally from the Czech Republic. Before joining the Rangers in 2017, Chytil played one year professionally for the Czech team PSG Zlín and said its rivalry with HC Kometa Brno was fiery. But playing the Islanders in New York would be even more intense.