He also played with Dubinsky at the WC. So he has a couple of familiar faces on the team.
Asking him to play a top 6 role is a little too much imo. I think he can contribute playing on the 3rd or 4th line. Mitchell has done nothing for months.
I don't think the Rangers are giving up a year on his entry level deal for him to sit in the press box. I think he is going to play game 1.
Derek Stepan, the Rangers second-year center out of Wisconsin, was Kreider’s teammate on Team USA's 2010 gold medal-winning World Junior Championship squad.
“In addition to playing with him, I played against him twice in two years at school and watched him pretty closely because I knew he was a Rangers’ guy,” Stepan told The Post in February. “He is a great skater and his speed is incredible, that’s obviously the first thing you notice about him, but he’s also extremely smart.
“He’s strong on the puck, he sees the game really well, and combining his sense of anticipation with his speed and quickness, that makes him so dangerous.”
Derek Stepan, the Rangers second-year center out of Wisconsin, was Kreider’s teammate on Team USA's 2010 gold medal-winning World Junior Championship squad.
“In addition to playing with him, I played against him twice in two years at school and watched him pretty closely because I knew he was a Rangers’ guy,” Stepan told The Post in February. “He is a great skater and his speed is incredible, that’s obviously the first thing you notice about him, but he’s also extremely smart.
Derek says that CK is extremely smart hockey player; I would guess that the naysayers on the board that insist that CK has no hockey sense might want to take notice. I see no reason not to play him v Ottawa as his speed and strength is something NYR need.
When Boston College and Wisconsin line up for Saturday’s national championship game, a pair of elite young forwards will be looking across the ice at each other but it certainly won’t be the first time that BC freshman Chris Kreider and Wisconsin sophomore Derek Stepan will see each other.
They were teammates last summer for a week in late June at rookie training camp for the New York Rangers, the NHL team that drafted both players – Stepan in the second round in 2008 and Kreider in the first round of 2009. They gathered again in August in Lake Placid for the USA Hockey National Junior Evaluation Camp, both made the gold-medal team that competed in late-December and early-January.
The players grew to be friends through all of that interaction. Being similar in age, Stepan and Kreider spent plenty of time together off ice during the New York Rangers training camp and were part of that close-knit U.S. Under-20 squad. That’s a team that took on Stepan’s outgoing demeanor.
“Derek’s great and a totally classy guy and that’s probably why we picked him to be our captain at World Juniors,” Kreider said.
