RALEIGH, N.C. — These are the Rangers doing what they have done best since October, confounding just about everyone but themselves while continuing to push limits and defy common wisdom.
These are the Rangers climbing the NHL beanstalk.
The mighty two-time defending champion Lightning are next. The task of doing to Tampa Bay what the playoff-tough Islanders could not do either of the last two years is a daunting one, but the Blueshirts are about as undaunted as any group you’d ever meet.
That is both the genesis and result of staring down playoff extinction five times in the last 10 games. That is the mindset that propelled the Rangers’ 6-2 Game 7 victory here over the ’Canes on Monday that clinched a ticket to the conference finals that will commence at the Garden on Wednesday.
This was a Blueshirt tour de force, the victory earned off a pair of power-play goals, with one scored by Chris Kreider; (another) outstanding performance by Igor Shesterkin; a momentum-defining huge hit delivered by Jacob Trouba; and a team-wide commitment to competing and defending.
Check this out: in the first period in which the Rangers seized a 2-0 lead on PPGs from Adam Fox at 3:40 and Kreider at 8:00 in scoring on two of the club’s first shots, the Blueshirts were credited with eight blocks to Carolina’s one. And after the second period in which Ryan Strome increased the lead to 3-0 with his club’s first five-on-five goal in 212:54 of hockey in Raleigh, the blocks were 16-6 in New York’s favor.
Black-and-Blueshirts, The Sequel.
This was the second time within the last 10 tournaments that the Rangers won a Game 7 on the road after home teams had won the first six matches of a series. Chris Kreider can tell you about the first time, the 2013 first round against the Caps in which he had an assist on Arron Asham’s game-opening goal in the Blueshirts’ 5-0 victory in D.C.
And of course Kreider is the lone Ranger remaining from the 2015 team that was upset by ascending Tampa Bay in a seven-game series capped by the Lightning’s 2-0 victory at the Garden.
That was a series in which Marty St. Louis and Ryan Callahan opposed each other but somehow in the wrong uniforms. The franchises are tied together by that captains trade and by the one at the 2018 deadline in which Ryan McDonagh and J.T. Miller were sent to Tampa Bay for what has amounted to be a negligible return.
Miller is no longer a member of the Lightning but McDonagh is part of the core of the Lightning team that has won 10 straight playoff series, a mark equaled by the 1956-60 Canadiens and exceeded by only the 1976-79 Canadiens, who won 13 straight, and the 1980-84 Islanders, who won 19 straight series en route to four consecutive Cups.
This is the caliber of opponent the Blueshirts will now confront. The caliber of goaltender the Blueshirts will face in this one will be far different than the first two rounds, to state the obvious. It will be Andrei Vasilevskiy, not Antti Raanta, not Pyotr Kochetkov, not Louis Domingue, not Casey DeSmith, not Tristan Jarry.
The Rangers will be challenging and will be challenged by history.
And by greatness.
Who knows if this is going any further? Who knows if this team could pull off what would be considered one of the massive upsets in semifinal/conference finals history? The 1979 Ooooh-La-La team finished 25 points behind the Islanders before pulling their shocking six-game upset victory in the semis. But those were the Islanders BG — Before Goring. They hadn’t won anything.
The Rangers and Lightning each recorded 110 points during the season. The Blueshirts had the edge in victories 52-51 but the reason they have home ice is because of their 44-39 edge in regulation-time victories. Still, in this instance the numbers do seem to lie.
There was all this talk the last couple of years about whether the Rangers were ahead of schedule on their rebuild that was announced in February of 2018 and affected through a pair of painful trade deadlines, deals for the future, multiple first-round draft selections and lottery luck.
The rebuild, though, veered into the express lane with the signing of free agent Artemi Panarin and the acquisition of and contract extension for Jacob Trouba. Adam Fox’s single-mindedness to play for the Rangers sort of helped. So did the fact that Igor Shesterkin brought his star with him from Moscow to Broadway.
And when the team’s performance last season did not measure up to expectations in the chairman’s suite, Jim Dolan replaced president John Davidson and general manager Jeff Gorton with Chris Drury, who in turn replaced David Quinn behind the bench with Gerard Gallant.
A dollop or three of imported toughness — both mental and physical — combined with deadline acquisitions have brought the Rangers to the conference finals.
And a date with history.