made their first trip to the NHL playoffs, facing the heavily favored Rangers in a best-of-three first-round series. After splitting the first two games, the Islanders won Game 3, and the series, when J. P. Parise scored 11 seconds into overtime. The teams met again in the 1979 playoffs; this time the underdog Rangers were victorious, eliminating the heavily favored Islanders in six games and earning a spot in the Stanley Cup Finals. This was particularly memorable as it continued the Islanders' reputation for playoff "chokes" despite finishing first in the league during the regular season. The teams met in the playoffs every year from 1981 to 1984; the Islanders won each series by margins of 4–0, 4–2, 4–2 and 3–2 en route to four finals and three Stanley Cups (in addition to their win to make it four championships and five finals in a row). In the 1990s, the teams met twice, with the Rangers winning 4–1 in 1990, and sweeping the Islanders 4–0 in 1994, en route to winning their first Stanley Cup since 1940. The 1994 first-round playoff series is the most recent meeting between the two teams in the playoffs. Fan reaction The Rangers' fanbase generally comes from the city's five boroughs, Westchester, Rockland, and Fairfield counties, while the Islanders tend to draw fans from Long Island, specifically the Nassau and Suffolk counties, Brooklyn, and parts of eastern Queens. Fans will frequently direct derisive chants at their rivals during games, regardless of whether the two teams are actually playing each other. At each home game, Ranger fans engage in perhaps their most popular chant: whistling the song "Let's Go Band" and punctuating it with "Potvin sucks!" This is a reference to retired Islander Hall of Fame defenseman Denis Potvin, who angered Rangers fans by breaking Center Ulf Nilsson's ankle. Nilsson has never characterized Potvin's hit as dirty and blames his broken ankle on his skate getting caught in a crevice in the ice at Madison Square Garden resulting in one leg taking the full weight of the hit. In a 2009 interview, 30 years after the hit, Nilsson said, "He [Potvin] was always fair. But the ice was never great in the Garden because they had basketball and other events. My foot just got caught. It was a freak thing." Nevertheless, this has not deterred Rangers fans from continuing their chant to this day. Rangers fans