Ottawa Senators vs New Jersey Devils

Lore & Background

To understand why the Devils still carry a particular venom in Ottawa, you have to understand what 1994-95 meant to a young franchise. The Senators had just arrived in the NHL, and in their third season they produced what many consider the best regular-season record in league history at that time. The city was drunk on hockey. The Corel Centre (now Canadian Tire Centre) was a cauldron. Everyone assumed the playoffs were a formality, a coronation. Then the Devils skated in.

New Jersey in the mid-1990s was a different animal. Led by Scott Stevens and a locker room that treated every shift like a street fight, the Devils were the NHL's ultimate underdog archetype: not the flashiest, not the highest-scoring, but the most relentless. In that 1995 first-round series, the physicality escalated game after game. Bodies flew into boards. Sticks snapped. The Senators' skilled forwards found themselves buried under layers of forechecking and body checks that made the ice feel like a construction site. When the Devils closed out the series in seven games, the silence in Ottawa was deafening. The city that had been celebrating a historic season was left staring at a television screen, unable to process that it was over.

The rivalry never quite reached the generational depth of Ottawa-Montreal or Boston-New Jersey, but in the specific, concentrated heat of that 1995 spring, it felt like the most important series in the building. For the Devils, it was validation that their identity—grit over glamour, will over wherewithal—could topple the best record in the league. For the Senators, it became the founding trauma of the franchise: the reminder that points on the board mean nothing if you cannot survive the spring.

In Their Own Story

The ice in Game 7 was a mess of white scars and black rubber. A Senators winger, still bleeding from a board collision in the second period, skated back on for the face-off and found himself immediately buried under two Devils who drove him into the corner with a kind of patience that felt almost surgical. The puck was gone. The crowd at the Corel Centre was on its feet, a low roar building like a storm front. Scott Stevens, his helmet slightly askew, stood over the downed player for a long beat, then turned and skated toward the bench, his stick dragging a thin line in the snow. The horn sounded. The series was over. In the tunnel, the Senators' dressing room was silent except for the sound of tape being ripped off sticks and the wet thud of helmets being set on the bench. Outside, the Ottawa night was cold and the city lights blurred through the glass, and somewhere in the parking lot a single fan was still holding a sign that read '130 AND COUNTING,' as if the number alone could change what had just happened.

Reader's Guide

The Ottawa-Devils rivalry was born of conference alignment in the early 1990s, when both clubs shared the Eastern Conference and met multiple times each season. But alignment alone does not create a rivalry; it requires a story, and the story was written in the spring of 1995.

The 1994-95 Senators posted a 130-point season, the best in the NHL at the time, and arrived at the playoffs as the clear favourite. The Devils, by contrast, were a team defined by physicality, forechecking, and a locker room culture that prized toughness above all. Scott Stevens, the captain, embodied that identity: a player who could score, pass, and also deliver a check that stopped a line in its tracks. In the first-round series, the Devils played their brand of hockey with increasing intensity, and the seven-game stretch became a war of attrition that the Senators, despite their superior regular-season numbers, could not win.

The statistical head-to-head over the full 1990s is lopsided in Ottawa's favour in the regular season, reflecting the Senators' talent depth. But the single most important series in the rivalry—the 1995 first round—went to New Jersey, and that one result has overshadowed every other meeting between the clubs. For the Devils, the series was a statement that their identity could beat the league's best record. For Ottawa, it became the franchise's defining 'what if.'

The rivalry shaped the Senators' identity in a paradoxical way: it reinforced the belief that the team could be the best in the league in the regular season, while also embedding a deep-seated anxiety about playoff survival. That tension—great regular seasons, fragile springs—has echoed through the franchise's history ever since. The Devils, for their part, carried the 1995 series as proof of their culture, and it fed directly into their 1995 Stanley Cup run. The rivalry cooled in the 2000s as the teams' trajectories diverged, but the memory of that spring remains the single most charged chapter in the relationship.

Did You Know?

• The 1994-95 Senators' 130-point season was the best regular-season record in NHL history at the time, yet the team lost its first playoff series to the Devils in seven games.
• The New Jersey Devils went on to win the 1995 Stanley Cup just weeks after eliminating the Senators, cementing the series as a turning point for both franchises.
• Scott Stevens, the Devils' captain in the mid-1990s, was renowned for combining elite two-way play with an enforcer's willingness to deliver bone-jarring checks, making him the physical face of the rivalry.
• The 1995 first-round series is still referenced by Ottawa fans as the franchise's defining playoff disappointment, a 'curse' that haunts discussions of the original Senators era.