Battling Sens grab series lead
OTTAWA 5 N.Y. RANGERS 4 (OT) Ottawa leads series 3-2
OTTAWA — The Ottawa Senators, who have defied the odds all season, are on the verge of the Eastern Conference final.
Kyle Turris ended Game 5 in overtime Saturday as the Senators jumped in front of the New York Rangers 3-2 in the best-of-seven second round series.
One more victory and the Sens will visit the Eastern Conference final for the first time in a decade, their last appearance, in 2007, preceding their first and only trip to the Stanley Cup final.
A win in Game 5 looked unlikely at many points.
The Rangers, who trailed for only four minutes and 11 seconds in the opening four games, scored twice in 66 seconds in the first frame. They have scored first gal in all five games the series.
Ottawa head coach Guy Boucher suggested before Saturday’s game that he wasn’t concerned by this, evidently warning his group otherwise. “We’ve talked about not sabotaging ourselves and we were on our way to doing that again,” Boucher said after the 5-4 Game 5 win.
But instead of sinking, as they had in dropping Games 3 and 4, the Sens rallied.
Mark Stone cut the deficit in half 50 seconds after Nick Holden gave New York a 2-0 lead when he outlasted Henrik Lundqvist on a rebound attempt. It was the first of three unanswered goals for Ottawa, which tied it on Mike Hoffman’s third of the playoffs and then went in front on the first by fourth line forward Tom Pyatt.
“You have to have that belief. You’re not going to score the first goal every game. It’s not going to always go your way,” Pyatt said afterward.
The Rangers pushed back hard over the back half of the second frame, eventually tied back it up and then charged back in front yet again when Jimmy Vesey stretched out to get a puck past Craig Anderson with seven minutes left in the third.
Derick Brassard jumped off the bench when Anderson exited for the extra attacker and got credit for a puck that bounced around the Rangers crease before eventually crossing the goal-line with 86 seconds left.
Erik Karlsson made the initial cross-ice pass through a sea of Rangers to Clarke MacArthur, whose shot went off Brassard into the net.
Boucher said his philosophy in six-on-five situations is simple: “Score.” He added: “In the end, we know that you need presence at the net. The two goals are pretty similar in the sense that we had guys there and the puck went in.”
Karlsson, who finished with three assists in more than 31 minutes, then fired the exit bomb from the Ottawa zone which led to Turris’s winner.
WASHINGTON 4 PITTSBURGH 2 Pittsburgh leads series 3-2
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Nicklas Backstrom changed the course of the game with the tying goal and Evgeny Kuznetsov and Alex Ovechkin scored 27 seconds apart as the Washington Capitals came back to beat the Pittsburgh Penguins 4-2 in Game 5 Saturday night to avoid elimination.
As Sidney Crosby gave the Penguins a boost with a return from his latest concussion, Braden Holtby had his strongest performance of the season, stopping 20 shots to help force a Game 6 in Pittsburgh on Monday night.
On the brink of elimination and trailing a Pittsburgh team that went 37-1-1 in the regular season and 6-0 in the playoffs when up after two periods, the Capitals finally responded like the Cup contenders everyone thought they should be.
“That’s just what we need in these tight games,” said Andre Burakovsky, who scored the tying goal in the first period and had another good game after replacing Ovechkin as the top-line left winger.
“We need our best players to step up and do the hard work and be the difference makers. I think that’s what they were tonight.”