Tom Renney officially said that there will be no lineup changes in terms of “same players” which doesn’t mean he won’t shuffle a line combo or somebody’s minutes in Game 2.

But overall, Renney liked what Game 1 showed him. After that game he said the Rangers will have to be better in Game 2, so I asked him if he’d pinpointed the areas in which the will need to improve.

“You can appreciate I’m not going to share those with you,” he said, “But yeah, we know where we’ve got to be better, and the beauty of it is we’ve been very good in those areas in the past. So, coming back to what we want to be as a team and how we can play.

“The other thing that I think is very important is, you know what? I think we did show a level of calm and maturity as a team, composure, poise, patience, all those types of things, to battle through an opening series game in the opponent’s building. They played well, and you know what? We’ve got to give ourselves some credit. We’ve been patting New Jersey on the back left and right and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying, ‘You know what? We did alright here. We’re up 1-0.’”

Later on he was asked about how the Rangers handled the Devils’ early Game 1 pressure, which was substantial. The Rangers did appear a bit loose in the first part of Game 1.

 

“I thought we hung in,” he said. “I thought we were resilient. I don’t know that we were as tidy as we wanted to be. But we hung in there and ultimately we were able to move pucks around them and get ourselves out of trouble and moving up ice, which is important.

“What I liked about our game – and I liked enough about it to know that we can certainly beat New Jersey when we play the way we have to – is the resolve and the resiliency to combat that. Other teams, if you watched opening games in other series, other teams are just getting hammered by the home team. New Jersey came after us and we weathered the storm. That’s a testimony to our resiliency, that’s a testimony to our leadership and that’s testimony to our poise and ability to stick with it. So that’s why I’m kind of excited with what might lie in front of us, because I do believe that we should just get better.”