Montreal, QC (SportsNetwork.com) – New York center Derek Stepan took part in the morning skate and team doctors will determine if he can play when the Rangers take on the Montreal Canadiens in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference finals Tuesday night.<\/p>\n
Stepan suffered a broken jaw when he was hit by Montreal’s Brandon Prust in Game 3 and missed Game 4 as a result. Stepan, who underwent surgery to repair the damage, was wearing a full face shield Tuesday and was skating with his regular linemates Chris Kreider and Rick Nash.<\/p>\n
“The only way he plays is if he gets medical clearance. It’s not up to him,” said Rangers coach Alain Vigneault on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Stepan had never missed a game since joining the Rangers, owning a streak of 348 consecutive tilts that included the playoffs. He has three goals and eight assists in 17 games this postseason. In 82 regular-season games, he had 17 goals and 40 assists.<\/p>\n
Prust was not penalized for the hit, but was slapped with a two-game suspension by the NHL that concludes after Game 5.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Montreal, QC (SportsNetwork.com) – New York center Derek Stepan took part in the morning skate and team doctors will determine if he can play when the Rangers take on the Montreal Canadiens in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference finals Tuesday night. Stepan suffered a broken jaw when he was hit by Montreal’s Brandon Prust […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nhl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}