After the opening two games between the Chicago Blackhawks and Boston Bruins, the Stanley Cup final is tied at one game apiece for the first time since the lockout.
Well, not this year’s lockout. I mean, that would be true, but it wouldn’t be very interesting. And because we need to be more specific in Gary Bettman’s wonderful world of perpetual work stoppages, let’s try this again: This year’s final is tied 1-1 for the first time since the lockout that wiped out the entire 2004-05 season. Much better.
Yes, in all seven Stanley Cup final series since 2004, the team that won the first game also won the second. (Although two of those teams still ended up losing the series.) Given that, I thought it would be worthwhile to look back at the most recent 10 times that we’ve found ourselves even after two games, and to see if the past has anything to teach us about what we might be able to expect this year.
The year: 1986
The teams: Montreal Canadiens vs. Calgary Flames
The first two games: Calgary rolled to a 5-2 win in Game 1 and had a chance to take a 2-0 series lead when Game 2 went into overtime. Instead, it took Montreal’s Brian Skrudland just nine seconds to tie the series.
What happened next: Montreal swept the remaining games, winning the series in five behind the goaltending of an unheralded rookie named Patrick Roy.
What we can learn: That getting an overtime done with early won’t kill you, for one thing. Beyond that, the Flames shared more than a few similarities with this year’s Hawks: both held home ice, both won Game 1, and both missed a chance to take a 2-0 series lead with an overtime loss in Game 2. The Flames didn’t win another game after that lost opportunity, which would make Bruins fans happy if it were possible for a Montreal Canadiens Cup win to do that. (Spoiler alert: It’s not.)
The Chicago Blackhawks and Boston Bruins needed a third overtime to decide Game 1 of their Stanley Cup final this week. It was the longest game of the 2013 playoffs. (The series picks up again Saturday night in Chicago.) Now it goes without saying that if you’re a fan of one of the teams involved, watching sudden-death overtime is torture. But if you’re a relatively neutral observer who wants to see an entertaining game, overtime is just about the best possible result. And the longer it drags on, the better.
But while you never know exactly how a long overtime game will turn out, veteran hockey fans should have a good idea of what to expect along the way. Here are 25 moments that you'll probably experience at some point in every multiple-overtime NHL playoff game.
1. When the game is still in regulation, but the announcers start saying it already feels like overtime
An announcer claiming that it feels like we’re already in overtime has become a mandatory moment in any close hockey game. It’s especially entertaining when it’s said in an overly ominous way, with the announcer trying to sound like an old man surveying the horizon and warning of an approaching storm.
In a typical matchup, this moment will happen about five minutes into the third period. In a game between two especially defensive-minded teams, it might happen midway through the national anthems.
The Stanley Cup final between the Chicago Blackhawks and Boston Bruins start tonight. And that means it’s time to break down the various matchups that will decide the series, such as coaching, goaltending, and special teams.
So yeah, hopefully somebody will do a post about those, because they’re super-important. In the meantime, here’s a look at some of the other key matchups to keep an eye on when Chicago and Boston face off for the Cup.
This is the time of year when you can expect to repeatedly encounter some variation of these words: We’re down to just two teams left standing in the NHL playoffs.
That phrasing always seemed oddly appropriate, since it implies that the rest of the league must be on the ground. And metaphorically speaking, that’s true. By the end of the third round, the floor is littered with failed playoff teams. Some may have collapsed from sheer exhaustion, others are sprawled out after a swift and bruising knockout, and a few are curled up in a little puddle of tears, wondering how it all went so wrong.
So before we move on to praising Boston and Chicago, let’s spend a few minutes picking through three rounds of postseason wreckage. Here are the 14 playoff teams that have been eliminated, ranked in order of how disappointing their playoff runs ultimately were.
The Bruins and Penguins are three games into their conference finals matchup, and the series has already produced its share of bad blood. We’ve seen Matt Cooke ejected for hitting Andrew Adam McQuaid from behind, a fight between Evgeni Malkin and Patrice Bergeron, and Sidney Crosby going nose-to-chest with Zdeno Chara. And that was just Game 1. As the series continues, it’s become clear that these two teams just don’t seem to like each other.
The animosity doesn’t come as much of a surprise, given which teams we're talking about. And we don’t just mean this year — Boston and Pittsburgh have a history that goes back decades, and it has featured some memorably nasty moments.
Here’s a visual guide to the history of the Penguins and Bruins hating each other.
The old sports cliché says that you’re never really in trouble in a playoff series until you lose at home. But, with all due respect to the wisdom of old sports clichés, right now the Los Angeles Kings look like a team that’s in a lot of trouble.
They’ve dropped the first two games of their Western Conference finals matchup with the Blackhawks, including a surprisingly easy Chicago win Sunday that saw L.A. trailing 4-0 before the midway mark. While the series has returned to Los Angeles for the next two games, the prospect of the Kings coming back to win four of five against the Presidents’ Trophy winners seems slim.
Or does it? After all, the Kings are the defending Stanley Cup champions, and they’ve already come back from a 2-0 series deficit this postseason (against the Blues in Round 1). Counting them out after two games of a seven-game series seems like a reach.
Here are eight things that are going wrong for the Kings right now, and our best guess as to whether they’ll be able to fix them in time.
The NHL playoffs can define a player’s career. It’s when some elevate their games while others crumble, when legacies are made and lost, and when we separate the clutch performers from the choke artists.
There are two schools of thought on all this, and one of them is that everything in that last paragraph is complete nonsense. The playoffs are far too small a sample size to draw any meaningful conclusions, and because there’s little evidence that “clutch” even exists in sports, all we're really doing is just crafting lazy and often unfair narratives out of statistical blips that should actually be credited to random chance.
The other school of thought is that while all of that might be true, we don’t care because overreacting to the playoffs is part of the fun of being a sports fan.
For the purposes of this post, we’re going with option no. 2. So here are 10 players that have seen their stock move significantly up or down during the first two rounds.
Don’t we all. I’m not sure what’s worse, the guy’s noxious personality or the fact that he looks exactly the same as Caillou’s mother. But either way, get in line, Colby.
Hockey fans have an uneasy relationship with the second round of the NHL playoffs. Don’t get us wrong. We like it. It’s fun. No complaints. It’s just that … well, if we have to be honest, it’s probably the postseason’s least interesting round.
We can all agree that the first round is pretty much the greatest thing ever. With eight series going on at the same time, there’s always a game on. The action is unbelievably intense, every other game goes into overtime, and the matchups feature a nice mix of powerhouse favorites and plucky underdogs.
By the time the third round rolls around, every game is crucial and every remaining team is a legitimate Cup contender. And most years, the finals are packed with enough tension and drama to make up for the fact that the league schedules each game nine days apart to make sure there’s never any momentum.
But Round 2 is just kind of … there. There are still a lot of games, but after Round 1 it feels like it’s not enough. There are always a few underdog teams who have almost worn out their welcome. And injuries are starting to tilt a few of the series in unfortunate ways (as opposed to the later rounds, when everyone is hurt so it doesn’t matter).
It wasn’t always like this. Prior to 1994, the second round was actually the divisional final, which meant guaranteed intensity and gave us clutch goal scorers like Doug Gilmour, Peter Stastny, and Steve Smith. But since the league ditched its divisional playoff format, Round 2 has become the NHL playoffs' unloved middle child.
It doesn’t have to be that way. We can learn to love the second round. To help, here’s a look back through 10 great second-round moments since the NHL moved to a conference-based system:
By Sean McIndoe at
AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Nathan Denette
By now, hockey fans have probably seen the video of a group of Toronto Maple Leafs fans watching last week’s Game 7 loss to the Bruins. If you haven’t, it’s below. Fair warning: It’s downright painful to watch.
You don’t have to be a Leaf fan or even follow hockey to understand what you’re witnessing. If you’ve been a die-hard fan of a team in any sport for long enough, chances are you’ve suffered through watching a game like that. Depending on which teams you follow, you may have been there far more often than you’d care to remember.
There’s no right or wrong way to react to the sight of your favorite team self-destructing on national television. But through the years, fans seemed to have developed a variety of methods for handling it. The next time you have to sit through a sports disaster for the ages, here are 20 different types of unhappy sports fans you might find yourself in the room with.
Penner — who has been derided for a lack of conditioning over his career and once actually injured himself eating pancakes — has apparently decided to just go ahead and embrace the fat joke.
The Senators and Penguins opened their second-round series Tuesday night, with Pittsburgh claiming an early series lead thanks to a 4-1 win on home ice.
The no. 1-seeded Penguins are the consensus favorites over the 7-seed Senators, but nobody would be surprised if the series turned out to be a long one. In the end, it may come down to which team can manage an edge in the key matchups.
Which key matchups, you ask, since you assume that’s what you’re supposed to do? Good question! Here are a dozen battles to watch as the series resumes on Friday night.
By Sean McIndoe at
Vince Talotta/Toronto Star via Getty Images
There’s a secret that Toronto fans aren’t supposed to talk about, but after what happened Monday night, I don’t care about anything anymore, so here it is: Heading into Game 7 against the Boston Bruins, Leafs fans were OK with losing.
Not "OK" as in we wouldn't care. Leafs fans wanted a win, were hoping for a win, and — in some cases — may even have talked ourselves into expecting a win. And we were ready for the three hours of agony we knew were coming. A Game 7 in the NHL playoffs is pure torture, and Leaf supporters were feeling that every bit as much as fans of the Bruins.
But there was an insurance policy, because the 2013 Leafs season was already a success. A team that hadn’t made the playoffs in seven seasons and was expected to miss them yet again had ended the drought. Young players who’d been written off as busts suddenly emerged. A franchise that floundered for a decade had finally found an identity. And though they were written off after falling behind three games to one in a series against a team that had spent the last few years kicking sand in their faces, the Leafs clawed back with a pair of gutsy wins to force a deciding game.
A loss would sting for a while, sure. But it couldn’t really hurt, not the way big losses are supposed to. It couldn’t leave a scar, whether it came in a blowout or sudden death or somewhere in between.
