Goalie matchup takes center stage

There are plenty of interesting matchups in the series between the Kings and the New Jersey Devils, but the most compelling one might be between two guys who will never be within 150 feet of each other on the ice: goalies Martin Brodeur and Jonathan Quick. Brodeur, 40, is a future Hall of Famer with three Stanley Cup championships. Quick, 26, is a Vezina Trophy finalist this season. So, the matchup isn’t really between the two goalies themselves, but in terms of how each team will deal with the opposing goalie.

To that end, who has beaten the better trio of goalies so far? The Kings, in this postseason, and dispatched Vancouver’s Roberto Luongo (and Cory Schneider), St. Louis’ Brian Elliott and Phoenix’s Mike Smith. The Devils have dispatched Florida’s Jose Theodore (and Scott Clemmensen), Philadelphia’s Ilya Bryzgalov and the New York Rangers’ Henrik Lundqvist. That’s a pretty good list for both teams. The Devils, having beaten Lundqvist, will now try to take down a second Vezina Trophy finalist in Quick. Devils coach Peter DeBoer was asked today about how to beat Quick…

DE BOER: “We’ve seen this before. In the last round, we had Lundqvist. The same things apply that applied to trying to get some goals past Lundqvist. You have to get traffic. You have to get bodies. You have to get shots through, and you can’t get frustrated. Lundqvist shut us out two of the first three games of that series despite, I thought, a pretty significant territorial advantage on our part. We stuck with it. So, you’re not going to get to guys like this easily, and they’re going to frustrated you at points of the series. It’s (about) battling through, but we have that experience now. We were rewarded for taking that approach against Lundqvist, and now we have to do the same thing here.’’