Senators advance after stellar night on Broadway
The Senators pulled off their Miracle on 34th Street on Tuesday night.
The Senators sent the New York Rangers packing from the NHL playoffs. Ottawa won 4-2 in Game 6 at Madison Square Garden to qualify for the Eastern Conference final for the first time since 2007 with a 4-2 series win.
Nobody expected the Senators to be one of the NHL’s final four, but they booked their ticket with a standout two-point effort by captain Erik Karlsson, while Mark Stone and Mike Hoffman also beat New York goaltender Henrik Lundqvist.
The Senators were able to survive a massive push by the Rangers as Chris Kreider and Mika Zibanejad scored for New York before Jean-Gabriel Pageau salted it away scoring into an empty net.
“It feels great,” Pageau said. “It was a great team effort. It shows that we needed everyone …
“But we don’t want to just sit on this now. We want to focus on the next series, but it feels really good to beat a really good team.”
The Senators now await the winner of Wednesday’s Game 7 between the Pittsburgh Penguins and Washington Capitals. The Senators are expected to start the Eastern final on the road in Game 1 on Saturday and Game 2 on Monday.
It’s expected Game 3 will be played on Wednesday in Ottawa, with the possibility of a two-day break before Game 4 next Saturday, but the schedule hasn’t been finalized.
The Rangers came out flying in the third and gave everything they had to stay alive. They made life difficult for the Senators by sending a message early. Only 53 seconds into the third, with the Senators holding a 3-1 lead, Kreider broke in alone to move the Rangers back to within a goal.
“I didn’t really change anything. It’s just one of those nights where we were better collectively as a group,” Senators netminder Craig Anderson said. “It’s a credit to our guys by buckling down to get the job done.”
Through 40 minutes, the Senators were giving themselves a chance and were ahead 3-1 despite being outshot 24-21.
Only moments after Zibanejad brought the crowd to life with his second of the playoffs to pull the Rangers to within a goal, Karlsson took a pass from Bobby Ryan and fired it past Lundqvist at 15:52 to restore a two-goal lead for the Senators. Zibanejad had scored at 13:32 to get the Rangers on the board.
Stone, who has been a force in the past two games, picked up where he left off in the first period by firing it past Lundqvist from the top of the circle at 14:44 to give Ottawa a 2-0 lead.
“The difference was the start,” Stone said. “If you look at those first two games (in N.Y.) we were on our heels for the first 10 to 15 minutes. We just couldn’t get out of it.
“We had a great first goal from Hoffman and we just kept pushing. We didn’t sit back. We just continued to move our legs.”
For the first time in this series, the Senators opened the scoring. That came at 4:27 of the first when Hoffman beat Lundqvist on the second shot he faced in the game by tipping a point shot by Karlsson home.
Perhaps it was Derick Brassard, the former Ranger, who enjoyed this the most.
“I’m not going to lie — it feels pretty good,” he said. “I have a lot of respect for the guys in the dressing room, the coaches and the organization. They fought really hard. We just found a way to win.”