In this strange Hurricanes season, bad feelings will come prepackaged in the playoffs

Who, in the spring of 2001, cared about the New Jersey Devils? David Puddy, maybe. Certainly not anyone around the Carolina Hurricanes or any of their fans.

Then, Scott Stevens clobbered Shane Willis coming through the neutral zone and stood up Ron Francis along the boards, knocking both out of the first playoff series played at what is now PNC Arena. Suddenly, everyone had an opinion about the Devils, none of them good.

The Hurricanes got their revenge in 2002 — Francis shrugged off Stevens to score the series-clinching goal — and drove Martin Brodeur around the bend in 2006 and produced an improbable Game 7 comeback in 2009.

It got a little weird: If the Hurricanes were in the playoffs, for a while they were guaranteed to see the Devils.

And for that while, regular-season games against the Devils had a little more spice. That can’t be conjured at will. Rivalries aren’t imposed through marketing or geography. They have to happen organically, and that almost always happens in the postseason.

For years, people tried to make Canes-Caps happen as a rivalry. It took seven brutal games in 2019 to take it to the next level. The fact that every time Montreal visited during the regular season a new Canes-to-Quebec rumor would start north of the border had as much to do with surliness over the Habs’ elimination at the hands of the Hurricanes in 2002 and 2006 as anything else.

Or take Buffalo. Please.

In the modern NHL, familiarity doesn’t breed contempt: Elimination games do. Even if only among fans.

“People outside think more about, is there a rivalry?” Hurricanes center Sebastian Aho said. “We’ll just go out there and do our best and try to win some hockey games.”

But this year’s division-focused NHL is a throwback NHL, back to the days when teams had to make it out of their division first in the playoffs, when the divisions were more than a way to organize the standings. If there was a lot of fighting in the old Norris Division, it’s because those teams really hated each other after eliminating one another year after year.

Bob Probert and Joe Kocur and Stu Grimson and Al Secord and Basil McRae weren’t avenging clean hits as the modern code illogically insists, or putting on a show for their supper like minor-league brawlers; their fights were bad blood spilling onto the ice, too often literally.

Across the NHL, we may not have seen that kind of old-school bare-knuckling this season, but tempers have certainly flared as teams see the same teams over and over again, and nobody else. All those years in the Southeast Division never seemed to spark anything between the Hurricanes and either of the Florida teams, but this season certainly did. The April games the Hurricanes played at Tampa Bay and Florida were chippy, to say the least.

The two last-season losses in Nashville raised the stakes, and if the Hurricanes get past the Predators to face the winner between those two, the bad feelings will come prepackaged.

There may not be any history between the Hurricanes and any of the teams they might play in the first two rounds, but there’s more than enough enmity from the regular season to spill over into the postseason.

“I think so,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “Let’s put it this way: after these series they will for sure.”

In that sense, it’s a partial shame the NHL will move away from these divisions and this format as cross-border travel becomes possible again. Keeping the playoffs within the divisions was a throwback solution to a new problem, and it should have the same consequences: more heated early series, at the expense of overall competitive equity. (It’s possible three of the four best teams in the NHL are in this division, but only one will advance to the third round.)

This was never a long-term thing, but it had short-term benefits as the NHL played its way through the pandemic. Division play was more interesting in the regular season; seeing the same teams over and over again didn’t get old until the Hurricanes and Predators segued right into their first-round series.

Who, in the spring of 2021, cares about the Predators or the Lightning or the Panthers? More than there would be otherwise, that’s for sure.

Whatever is going to happen next already has a head start.