NHL Playoffs: Rangers push Hurricanes to Game 7
Anthony Scultore
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The NHL Playoffs second round will get a Game 7 thanks to the New York Rangers.
In the best-of-seven series between the first and second place teams in the Metropolitan Division the home team has held serve winning every game. The Rangers beat the Carolina Hurricanes at Madison Square Garden on Saturday night to stay alive.
The Hurricanes are a perfect 7-0 in these playoffs at PNC Arena and that’s where the final contest of this series takes place. Can the Rangers break the trend and finally beat Carolina on home ice? Answers will come Monday night at 8PM ET.
NHL Playoffs: Rangers 5 vs Hurricanes 2
Filip Chytil scored twice in the second period and Igor Shesterkin made 37 saves as the host New York Rangers staved off elimination again and defeated the Carolina Hurricanes 5-2 Saturday night in Game 6 of their Eastern Conference second-round series.
“I tried to keep shooting every time there’s a chance,” Chytil said. “Many times in these playoffs even when we don’t score a goal or it doesn’t go to the net and they block it, we still get chances off these shots when we are first on the puck and we can keep possession.”
The Rangers won their sixth straight home game since taking a triple-overtime loss in the first-round opener against the Pittsburgh Penguins on May 3. New York also won its fourth straight elimination game to force a seventh game Monday night in Raleigh, N.C.
Tyler Motte opened the scoring 7:22 into the first period and Mika Zibanejad scored in his fourth straight game when he netted a power-play goal 2:29 later. Chytil scored twice in a span of 3:23 in the second period, both times giving the Rangers three-goal leads, and Artemi Panarin scored during a 5-on-3 in the third.
“Just belief in our group. We’ve got a lot of great guys in that room,” Motte told ESPN. “We have each other’s back and go to work for each other. It’s Game 7 (next) let’s see what we’re made of.”
Shesterkin also became the fifth goaltender in NHL history to collect two assists in a playoff game. He had the secondary assists on both Chytil goals, and joined Pekka Rinne (2017), Jose Theodore (2004), Tom Barrasso (1993) and Grant Fuhr (1991) as the only goalies in NHL history with two assists in a playoff game.
Brady Skjei and Vincent Trocheck scored for Carolina, which is 0-6 in road games this postseason and has been outscored 26-10 in those games.
“We’re going to try and scrap this game,” Skjei said. “Move on past. We did obviously the same exact thing in the first round with the wins and losses at home, on the road. It’s obviously right now a little frustrating that we couldn’t close it out, but we’ll forget about this pretty quickly and we have a lot of confidence at home like our record shows. We are excited and we’ll be ready to go on Monday.”
NHL.com
Carolina goalie Antti Raanta made 10 saves before being pulled after Chytil’s first goal. Pyotr Kochetkov stopped 10 shots in his third appearance of the playoffs.
–Field Level Media contributed to this article