The Edmonton Oilers lost a key player at the beginning of the Stanley Cup finals. Now, it's the Carolina Hurricanes' turn to deal with an injury.
Center Doug Weight won't play in Game 6 today after a crushing hit by two Edmonton players apparently left him with an injured shoulder.
"Obviously, it's a tough loss for us," said coach Peter Laviolette, who's usually tightlipped about injuries but decided not to conceal the severity of Weight's condition. "Doug is a part of the reason we have gotten this far."
The Hurricanes won't get much sympathy from the Oilers.
Edmonton goalie Dwayne Roloson, a major reason the eighth-seeded team made it to the finals, sustained a series-ending knee injury in the waning minutes of Game 1 when he was knocked into the net during a goal-mouth collision.
The Oilers rallied around third-string goalie Jussi Markkanen, who has played well enough to keep the series going this far, though Carolina still leads 3-2.
The Hurricanes are confident they can close out the series without Weight, a 35-year-old center who was acquired from St. Louis in January to provide some depth and leadership on the front line.
"Weight is a great player and we're going to miss him tremendously," said Eric Staal, the team's top scorer during the regular season and in the playoffs. "But we've had other guys go down and other guys step up."
Indeed, Carolina already has shown it can cope with injuries, reaching the finals even though 30-goal scorer Erik Cole went down with a fractured neck in early March and several other players have been banged up.
"I'm not sure that many teams sustained as many injuries as we did," Laviolette said. "We had, I think, close to 270 man-games lost through the course of the season, yet we were always able to maintain a winning attitude and record."
But the Hurricanes are clearly hurting, and the Oilers believe their physical play is taking a toll in the series. Raffi Torres, in particular, has been a one-man wrecking crew. Age could be another factor. as many of Carolina's top players are in their 30s.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier