Playing disciplined, decisive and dominating hockey, the team in red skated out a master class, the kind of game that serves as a reminder that this is a club that have won three Stanley Cups in the past 14 years, a record bettered only by the Detroit Red Wings. The New Jersey Devils themselves, though, did come to the boil, and quickly. Since the result was never in doubt the crowd never panicked because the crowd never panicked the atmosphere inside the Prudential Center never came to the boil. The home team trashed their guests by a score of 4-1 the 'Canes were lucky to score even once and would have struggled to net any more even if the Devils clocked off early. As a contest, though, last night's game was sketchy. An unattractive match-up on paper does not necessarily mean an unattractive match-up on the ice. It's a bit like refusing to recognise the United States as being a legitimate country because it was founded on stolen land.įans of both the Devils and the Hurricanes may chafe at the following statement, but regardless of the teams' success theirs was probably the least glamorous match-up of the 2009 play-offs. There are, of course, those in hockey's heartlands who will never really view the Hurricanes as being a legitimate club. It might be argued that of all of the league's forays – its sometimes mad dash to become a truly national game – the outpost in Carolina has been the most successful. This boost was boosted yet further when in 2006 the erstwhile Whalers won the Stanley Cup, the first club to do so in the post-lockout 'New NHL.'įurther emphasis was given to the fact that times were changing when the Southerners beat the Edmonton Oilers in the finals, a powerhouse team of the past. Sports Illustrated, easily the most sceptical of publications when it comes to hockey, suggested that in Carolina the NHL was becoming more popular than NCAA basketball. Then – and to the surprise of pretty much everyone – the National Hockey League's decision to transplant a club to the heartlands of Nascar and college hoops began to bear fruit. During the team's second home game, against the Los Angeles Kings, one fan could be seen sitting among banks of empty seats holding a placard that read 'Good sections still available'. Some years ago Channel 4's Transworld Sport programme showed a heartbreaking film about fans of the old team travelling south to support the new team that now played hundreds of miles from where they lived. That somewhere was else was Connecticut, and what are now the Hurricanes were once the Hartford Whalers. In fact, next to the 'Canes, the Devils are the Dallas Cowboys, the Los Angeles Lakers and Manchester United smashed into one.Ĭarolina received its hockey club after it was taken from somewhere else. This year the opponents were the Carolina Hurricanes, an organisation roughly as fashionable as a bottle of dandelion & burdock. This time last year New Jersey drew their hated local rivals, the New York Rangers, in the first round and were made to look foolish by the cool club from the state next door. The club themselves may have done nothing whatsoever to serve up anything signifying the opening night of the play-offs – no rock music, no local radio station DJs, no bloody balloons, even – but what the PA announcer inside later described as "a sell-out crowd" – although one assumes that 3,000 of the 17,000 attendees came dressed as seats – was ready to roll, indulging in that most imaginative of American sports chants, "let's go De-vils." An hour before the puck dropped last night, the spaces surrounding the Prudential Center – the team's shining new home, reckoned by many to be the best arena in the league – were primed for a party. Still, just because the Devils aren't a water-cooler concern for the folks in Indianapolis doesn't mean that Game One of this year's play-offs passed without mention.
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