PITTSBURGH — So it’s the Bruins or the Canadiens, and either way, the Rangers know they will have their hands full.
With their 2-1 Game 7 win over the Penguins on Tuesday night, the Blueshirts advanced to the Eastern Conference finals for the second time in the past three years. They will face off against Boston or Montreal, who play their own decisive seventh game on Wednesday night.
“It’s a pretty tight series, it honestly can go either way,” said forward Derick Brassard, a force yet again on his line between Benoit Pouliot and Mats Zuccarello, and the Rangers player who arguably watches more hockey around the league than any other.
“You can’t pick your team in the playoffs, you’re always going to face good teams. I think we could fit good against both teams. You going to the conference final, you’re going to face a pretty good team.
“We’ll see how it goes, but we know both of those teams.”
The Rangers have a recent history with the Bruins, losing a lopsided five-game series in the second round last year. They last faced the Canadiens during the postseason in the first round in 1996, when they beat them in six games.
“Both opponents have got meaning,” said coach Alain Vigneault, who broke into the NHL head coaching realm with the Canadiens from 1997 to 2000, and whose most recent team before the Rangers, the Canucks, lost to the Bruins in the 2011 Stanley Cup finals in seven games. “We’ll take whoever is there and we’ll get ready.”
Because the Rangers advanced to the conference finals, they now surrender a 2014 first-round pick instead of a second-rounder to the Lightning in the deal that sent Blueshirts captain Ryan Callahan to Tampa Bay as part of a package that brought back Martin St. Louis.
The Rangers power play didn’t exactly blow anyone away in this series, but progress could be seen with a 1-for-2 performance in Game 7, and a 2-for-3 performance in Game 5 — sandwiching a forgettable 0-for-6 in Game 6, as all three contests were wins.
“The power play has been the talk for the first two rounds, and now a power-play goal was the difference,” said St. Louis, who set up Brad Richards on a great backhand feed for this man-advantage tally midway through the second period that won them the game and the series. “You try to be part of the solution, and we did tonight and that was the difference.”
It’s also not a coincidence that the power play’s revival — now 6-for-44 (11.1 percent) this postseason — coincided with the return of Chris Kreider, who missed 19 games in a row before coming back for Game 4, scoring the power-play goal in Game 5 and being on the ice for this one in Game 7.
“He’s a big part of our top-six forwards,” Vigneault said, after he played Kreider a total of 11:16, none of it in the final 6:56. “His size, his speed … it wears the other team down. Obviously when we got him back, it was a huge boost for our team.”
The Rangers’ penalty kill held the Penguins’ No. 1-ranked power play to just one goal on 20 attempts.
The Rangers had the same lineup as they had for the past two games, meaning Derek Dorsett stayed in on the fourth line — playing 9:08 — and John Moore stayed in on defense.