Florida and New York have only met once during the playoffs, nearly 30 years ago

The Florida Panthers departed from Fort Lauderdale on Tuesday afternoon bound for the Big Apple.

That’s where they’ll find the New York Rangers waiting, ready to host Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals on Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden.

Florida enters their second straight conference final fresh of a six-game victory over the Boston Bruins in round two.

The Cats have gone 8-3 so far during the postseason, including an impressive 4-1 mark away from home.

They’ll face different animal in the Rangers than what they have faced so far in the Bruins and Tampa Bay Lightning, but Florida remains confident that their style of hockey holds up well when it comes to the playoffs.

“Each series has its own personality, for sure,” said Panthers Head Coach Paul Maurice. “And for each team, there would be styles of game, so I think we’ve got a pretty good handle on it. It's a high-end team in the Eastern Conference, so they have a certain style to their offensive game and the players that they have, but everything becomes new, and you reinvent yourself every series.”

In Florida’s first two opponents, there was quite a bit of familiarity.

Both Boston and Tampa Bay are divisional rivals with the Panthers who the Cats have also faced in recent postseasons.

The only playoff history between the Panthers and Rangers came when Wayne Gretzky was taking shots on John Vanbiesbrouck, but don’t think that will keep this year’s series from reaching peak levels of intensity in short order.

It is still, after all, the conference finals.

“I think when you get into these late stages, that's kind of where rivalries come from,” said Panthers forward Evan Rodrigues. “It gets more intense. There's more on the line, a trip to the Stanley Cup Finals. So the history might not be there, but the intensity will get there, I'm sure, right from that first puck drop.”

While the Panthers are coming off a strong season in which they claimed the Atlantic Division crown, New York arrives boasting their own division title. They also took home the Presidents’ Trophy as the league’s top regular season team.

The Rangers started the playoffs by winning seven consecutive games, something that they did once before. In 1994. When they won the Stanley Cup. So there’s that.

At the end of the day, both teams are going to have their hands full.

It should be a hell of a conference final.

“For us to have a chance to beat the President's Trophy winner, we have to be a better team right now than we were when we started the playoffs,” Maurice said. “We have to have learned a bunch of things, we have to have suffered some defeats, some adversity, and we have to be better than we were when we started. I think we are, and that gets tested every round.”

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