Rangers begin playoff push after standing pat at deadline

NEWARK » Sometimes, the best moves are the ones you don’t make.

As Monday’s National Hockey League trade deadline approached, both the New Jersey Devils and New York Rangers were among the more intriguing teams to keep an eye on.

Surely, the Devils, in the bottom five of the league standings and with a very real chance to “earn” the first overall pick once for the second time in three years, would be sellers. They were.

A blockbuster deal with the New York Islanders shipped off stalwarts Kyle Palmieri and Travis Zajac in exchange for a 2021 first-round draft pick, conditional 2022 fourthrounder and two fringe prospects, while Nikita Gusev and Sami Vatanen were both put on waivers and claimed by Florida and Dallas, respectively. Veteran blueliner Dmitry Kulikov was also dealt to the Edmonton Oilers for a conditional fourth-rounder as well.

Only Jonas Siegenthaler, a little-used Swiss-born defenseman, was added, via a trade with the Washington Capitals for a third-round pick.

More uncertain, however, was what the Rangers would do. Only a few points out of the fourth and final playoff spot in a stacked East Division, there was some speculation on both sides; that the Blueshirts would be sellers on some of their more valuable depth players given that’s unlikely that they’d be able to jump the Boston Bruins in the standings, or, with fans now being allowed into Madison Square Garden, that management might try to make some sort of win-now deal that could dip into the pool of prospects that they’d acquired over the past few years.

In the end, the Rangers were neither buyers nor sellers.

They were sitters.

General manager Jeff Gorton ultimately opted to make no moves at all, and that strategy seems to have paid quick dividends in a 3-0 shutout win over the Devils at the Prudential Center on Tuesday night, the first of four consecutive matchups against their struggling rivals that could tighten up the playoff race without having had to mortgage any of the future or move any of the current contributing players to do so.

In fact, with Vitali Kravtsov, who was the team’s ninth overall pick in the 2018 NHL Draft, having come over to North America and slotting into the lineup over the last two weeks — not to mention to potential addition of defenseman Zac Jones, who just signed his entry-level deal after foregoing the remainder of his collegiate eligibility at UMass — and the Rangers added the kind of talent for “free” that they likely would have attempted to acquire at the deadline.

On Tuesday, however, it was the usual suspects who got the job done for the Rangers. Mika Zibanejad, whose early season struggles seem to be long forgotten, opened the scoring with a breakaway goal at the 7:02 mark of the first period, and Artemi Panarin doubled the Blueshirts lead midway through the second when he finished on a beautiful feed from Filip Chytil, snapping it past Mackenzie Blackwood to make it a 2-0 game.

Pavel Buchnevich’s emptynetter iced the game for the Rangers late, and Igor Shesterkin made 27 saves for his first career NHL shutout.

“It helps to relax when it’s all over, and everyone’s staying put and the team is staying the same, keeps working,” Panarin said through a translator in the postgame Zoom session. “We actually don’t care what the opponent does or what trades they make, we just have to take care of our business.”