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In an eight-game stretch filled with revenge and fixing wrongs to start the season, Thursday will mark another chance for the Rangers.
They already won at home, stringing together five consecutive victories at the Garden after a miserable campaign there last year. They started to shift the Battle of New York after getting swept in 2024-25 with a commanding victory against the Islanders.
And Thursday, after dropping two of three games to the Devils last year and consistently getting tormented by superstar Jack Hughes, the Blueshirts will have a chance to take the first game of this year’s edition of the Battle of the Hudson.
“His speed, his puck-handling ability, his playmaking ability — he’s a guy that plays in motion a lot,” head coach Mike Sullivan, who coached Hughes with Team USA and called him “dynamic,” said after practice Wednesday. “If Jack has the ability to play three-quarters of the ice, he’s really dangerous, and so I think we’ve gotta do our best to force him to play goal line to goal line and have to go through numbers to get through the scoring area because he’s a unique player in how he plays the game.”
Hughes, who was selected No. 1 overall in 2019 one pick before the Rangers selected Kaapo Kakko, has collected 35 points in 26 regular-season games against the Blueshirts.
Since the Rangers’ struggles began following their run to the Eastern Conference finals in 2024, the Devils have trolled them, too, on social media — including in December 2024, when they wrote, “Safe travels across the Hudson” with a GIF of a dumpster on fire following a 5-0 victory.
The outlook, even just two weeks into the season, has started to look different, though. The Rangers sat in second in the Eastern Conference with 12 points entering play Wednesday.
The Devils were in 13th place in the conference. But they still have Hughes, who already has eight points — including two goals — in six games and who emerged as the Olympic hero with his game-winning goal against Canada to help Team USA take gold in Milan.
And in order for the Rangers to temporarily take their place atop the New York City-area hockey hierarchy, they’ll need to reverse their struggles with containing him that have spanned seasons and coaching staffs.
The Rangers’ quest to unlock Pavel Dorofeyev — whom they acquired on draft night from the Golden Knights and then signed to a $77 million deal — continued in practice Wednesday, when they moved him to the bumper spot on the first power-play unit and shifted Alexis Lafrenière to the flank opposite Mika Zibanejad.
Dorofeyev, who scored 72 goals the last two seasons and had 20 with the man advantage last year, managed just one tally through the Rangers’ first eight games.
“The question that I’m trying to answer, and this is the discussion the coaching staff had is, how do we maximize [Dorofeyev’s] greatest attribute, which is his scoring ability,” Sullivan said, while reiterating that he still believes Dorofeyev will score goals for the Rangers.
The Rangers recalled Justin Dowling to serve as their center on the fourth line and assigned 20-year-old Cole Beaudoin to AHL Hartford. Beaudoin logged just 3:29 of ice time Tuesday and he’ll get a chance to log more minutes near the top of the lineup with the Wolf Pack.