The Rangers won’t have home-ice advantage in the first round.
The question now is: Who will they play?
Because the Devils defeated the Sabres on Tuesday night, the Rangers are now locked in position as the No. 3 team in the Metropolitan Division.
Entering the evening, the Rangers (107 points) needed a win in their regular-season finale against Toronto and two consecutive losses from the Devils to move into second in the division.
The Devils now have 110 points.
The Hurricanes, in first place, have 111.
That ends any chance for additional shuffling of the Rangers’ position.
At one point Monday, as the shootout unfolded in the Rangers’ eventual loss to the Sabres, Gerard Gallant glanced at the Madison Square Garden scoreboard.
When he scanned the outcomes around the NHL, it made the head coach glad that the Rangers already had secured their postseason spot.
“Oh, it’s a battle,” Gallant said after the game Monday. “I mean, fortunately, we’re in a good spot right now. I mean, we’ll see what happens in the standings over the next few days, but you look at the battles below us, and those teams are battling right now — like Buffalo [on Monday].”
Though Gallant has reiterated that the standings are what they are, and the Rangers’ playoff seeding will unfold however it unfolds, he sounded, at the very least, relieved to have avoided the cluster of four teams for two spots that is defining the final days of the regular season in the Eastern Conference.
Gerard Gallant checked out the league scoreboard on Monday, and got a sense of relief. for the NY POSTAfter the games Tuesday night, the Panthers held the first wild-card spot with 92 points.
The Penguins, at 90 points, controlled their own destiny until they lost to the Blackhawks on Tuesday.
The Sabres remained in contention (barely) at 87 points — until their loss to the Devils.
The Rangers removed themselves from those scenarios when they clinched a postseason berth March 27.
That turned the final two weeks of the regular season into a quest for seeding with the Rangers, Devils and Hurricanes all stationed atop the Metropolitan Division standings.
“Obviously, you want to try and win and get home ice and open up in front of the fans,” defenseman Adam Fox said following the game Monday. “But I think once you’re there, you just gotta win games any way. You gotta win road games, too. I don’t think we’re too concerned with that.”
Home-ice advantage would’ve been a welcome bonus for the Rangers, who have been the lower seed in four of their past seven playoff series — dating to 2015-16, and not counting the best-of-three set against the Hurricanes in the 2019-20 “bubble” qualifying round.
“If we want to win the Stanley Cup,” center Filip Chytil said Monday, “we have to beat anybody, anywhere.”
Patrick Kane’s assist on Artemi Panarin’s first second-period goal Monday was the 786th of his career, which moved him into 36th place all-time, passing Mats Sundin.
Patrick Kane climbed higher up the NHL record books on Monday.
Kane could next pass Peter Stastny (789).
That Panarin goal also made Monday the sixth game out of the past eight in which the Rangers scored a power-play goal.
They now have the seventh-best conversion rate in the NHL at 23.9 percent.
The Rangers will practice Wednesday ahead of their regular-season finale against the Maple Leafs at the Garden.
