The Ottawa Senators are finally delivering in the playoffs after a decade of disappointing failures.
Jason Spezza scored the go-ahead goal and set up another by Daniel Alfredsson in a three-goal second period on Saturday night as Ottawa beat the New Jersey Devils 3-2 to win their Eastern Conference semi-final series in five games.
Goaltender Ray Emery, who showed no effects from a minor automobile accident in Ottawa on Friday, made 27 saves to cap a series in which he clearly outplayed Martin Brodeur, who set an NHL record with 48 wins this season but had only 21 saves in Game 5.
Scott Gomez scored twice for New Jersey in what may have been the final Devils' game at the Continental Airlines Arena. The three-time Stanley Cup champions are moving to a new arena in Newark next season, but they will leave the Meadowlands having not gotten past the second round in the last three postseasons.
The Senators will face either the Buffalo Sabres or New York Rangers in the conference final with the winner earning a trip to the Stanley Cup finals. While Ottawa has been to the playoffs in each of the last 10 years, it has never made it to the finals. The only time they made the conference finals, the Devils beat them in seven games en route to winning the Cup.
Whoever faces the Senators will go up against a team that continues to get great goaltending
Dany Heatley, playing with Spezza and Alfredsson, had two assists.
Antoine Vermette made the biggest play of Game 5, keeping the puck in the Devils' zone early in the second period and eventually tipping in a shot by defenseman Tom Preissing past Brodeur to tie the score at 1.
Red Wings 4, Sharks 1
At Detroit, Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg each scored a goal and set up two others, leading Detroit past San Jose and within one victory of reaching the Western Conference finals.
Detroit leads 3-2 and can end the series tonight in San Jose.
Datsyuk turned San Jose goalie Evgeni Nabokov's misplay into the winning goal late in the second period, and Nabokov didn't seem the same after that, surrendering a pair of third-period power-play goals.
Marcel Goc scored with 15:07 left in the first period to give the Sharks a 1-0 lead.
Zetterberg tied the score three minutes into the second period.
Mikael Samuelsson added an insurance goal nearly four minutes into the final period, slapping a one-timer past Nabokov. Tomas Holmstrom concluded the scoring with 13:46 left in the third.
Defenseman Mathieu Schneider broke his wrist in the first period and will miss the rest of the playoffs.
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