Senators within one win of Eastern final
Ottawa rallies after early New York flurry to put Rangers on the brink
OTTAWA— A team that’s been defying the odds all season is now on the verge of the Eastern Conference final.
Kyle Turris ended Game 5 in overtime early Saturday evening as the Ottawa Senators jumped in front of the New York Rangers 3-2 in the best-of-seven second round series with a 5-4 win.
One more victory and the Senators 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, beginning with how it
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started.
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. In fact, they’ve scored the first goal in all five games this series.
Head coach Guy Boucher suggested before Saturday’s game that he wasn’t concerned by this reality, evidently warning his group otherwise.
“We’ve talked about not sabotaging ourselves and we were on our way to do that again,” Boucher said.
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 said the message on the Ottawa bench was “pretty clear” at that point: Seven minutes remained to tie the game.
“Everything was positive,” Brassard said. “It was just, ‘Keep pushing! Keep pushing!’ ”
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 goalline with 86 seconds left.
Erik Karlsson made the initial cross-ice pass through a sea of Rangers to Clarke MacArthur, whose shot eventually rebounded off of Brassard and into the net.
It was exactly one week earlier that Jean-Gabriel Pageau tied Game 2 at five with 62 seconds left in regulation with the third of his four goals — the latter ending it for the Senators in double-overtime.
Boucher said his philosophy in sixon-five situations is simple: “Score.”
The Senators have won all three of their games this series at Canadian Tire Centre while falling with a thud in both games at Madison Square Garden. They lost Games 3 and 4 by a combined 8-2 margin.