PITTSBURGH - Game 7 will be the end of the line for either the Rangers or the Pittsburgh Penguins, but what that end actually means depends on the team.
For the Rangers, who won a Game 7 in their previous series and battled back from a brutal schedule, a death in their extended family and a three-games-to-one deficit against the Penguins, this season will be regarded as a success no matter the outcome Tuesday night.
But for the Penguins, a defeat is likely to mark the end of an era. The team that won the Stanley Cup in 2009 but proceeded to implode in the playoffs every year since would almost surely be broken up. 'No, I don't,' Coach Dan Bylsma said Tuesday morning when he was asked if he thought of Game 7 as a franchise-defining game. 'We're in Game 7 to advance to the conference final. I'm not looking at a bigger picture than that.'
But in defeat, the bigger picture could well include Bylsma's firing. Goalie Marc-Andre Fleury would probably be gone. And most landscape altering of all, the gold dust duo, Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, could well be broken up, with Malkin potentially dangled as trade bait to acquire a franchise defenseman who would add the kind of postseason backbone the Penguins often seemed to lack.
A defeat could also sully Crosby's shining reputation as a clutch player. He would no longer be known only as Canada's gold medal hero and the youngest captain ever to hoist the Stanley Cup. He would also be marked down as a player who loses his concentration at playoff time and resorts to unseemly cheap shots. 'I don't think we look at it the way you said it,' Crosby said Monday when asked if he thought of Tuesday's game as possibly the end of something. 'We look at it as a great opportunity.'
Since Bylsma took over in the middle of the 2008-9 season, the Penguins have been an exciting, glamorous and high-powered team. Their consistent regular-season success has come despite a long series of injuries. Crosby had a 14-month recovery from concussion, then had his jaw broken by an errant shot; Malkin injured both knees, and needed an operation on one knee to repair torn ligaments; this season, the Penguins lost more than 500 man-games to injury. But the Penguins consistently self-destructed in the playoffs, most recently in 2012, when the Philadelphia Flyers aggravated Crosby to the point of distraction, and in 2013, in an embarrassing third-round sweep by the Bruins.
After that, General Manager Ray Shero extended Bylsma's contract through the 2015-16 season (and later helped select Bylsma as the United States Olympic coach). But the veteran coach Jacques Martin was also hired to help Bylsma on the bench, and the goaltending coach was replaced to try a new approach to help the shaky Fleury. Going into Game 7, Crosby, the N.H.L.'s scoring champion, has been the biggest struggler of all. He had just one goal in 12 postseason games, and he melted down in Sunday's Game 6 loss to the Rangers. He speared Dominic Moore in the groin, slew-footed Dan Girardi and crosschecked Brian Boyle in the lower back - acts of frustration and petulance that have increasingly defined Crosby's postseason performance in recent years.
Of course, a Game 7 victory would change everything for Pittsburgh. After all, in 2011 Claude Julien was about to lose his job as Boston coach and the Bruins roster was about to be broken up. But the Bruins beat Montreal in overtime in Game 7 of their first-round series, then went on to win the Cup. The same could happen for the Penguins.
If the Rangers win Game 7 Tuesday night, everything that comes afterward is gravy. They had an excellent second half of the regular-season under their first-year coach, Alain Vigneault, and made the playoffs for the eighth time in the last nine seasons. They showed resiliency in beating the Flyers in seven, and have showed still more against the Penguins while rallying around Martin St. Louis, whose mother died last week. Vigneault has done what General Manager Glen Sather hired him to do: make the Rangers a more offense-minded team and bring a calming influence after the turmoil of John Tortorella's coaching tenure. He has also led the Rangers far into the postseason, and if the Rangers win Game 7, they will be in the conference finals for only the second time since 1997.
A defeat, however, would lead to the important questions the Rangers must answer in any event. Will they use their last compliance buyout on Brad Richards and his expensive contract, even though he had a strong bounceback season? Or might Sather surprise, as he has so often, and exercise the buyout on Rick Nash, who went into Game 7 with just one goal in 25 playoff games as a Ranger?
For one team, one set of questions will loom Wednesday morning. The other, happier team will move on to Montreal or Boston.
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