Dawson Mercer tripped Adam Fox in the neutral zone, nobody blew a whistle, and Cody Glass scored a shorthanded goal out of it. That's real. It's also the seventh goal of the night, in a game New Jersey had already put away with a four-goal run that took a little over five minutes earlier on.
The no-call doesn't take anything away from the blowout. You don't get to point at the garnish and ignore the meal. By the time Glass buried that shorthanded goal, New Jersey had already scored on six different plays and Luke Hughes had two goals of his own. Nico Daws, meanwhile, was shutting the door at the other end on his way to his first win of the season. A blown call after a team is already down 6-1 doesn't decide a 7-1 final. It just adds insult to an injury that was already fatal.
Don't buy the idea that this proves the Devils turn into a different, superior team specifically when the Rangers show up. One game, the first of four meetings these teams play this season, is a data point. New York arrived having won six of its last seven, the Devils arrived a game under .500, and for one night the better team on paper got embarrassed by the team that actually showed up ready to play. It's just what happens when Rodrigues scores with half a minute left in the first period and the roof caves in right after.
The blame for this one is easy to place. It sits on New York's own third period, a team playing like it's 6-2-0 and assumed the standings would win the game for them, against a Devils team that had twelve different players touch a point and only needed Jack Hughes for one of them. When your best forward is quiet and you still hang seven on the board, that's the depth doing the work. That's a scary fact for every other team on New Jersey's schedule, not just the Rangers.
Daws deserves to be named plainly rather than buried under the goal totals. A goaltender who wins 7-1 and picks up his first victory of the season doesn't need an asterisk on it. He stopped what he needed to stop, and the Rangers never found anything resembling a second-period response to make him work.
If New York wants to spend the week arguing about Mercer's feet, that's their business. That's on them, separate from the scoreboard. A team that got outscored 6-1 before the questionable sequence has a 7-1 loss it can't explain any other way. Pretending otherwise doesn't hold up.
