Claude Giroux scored 5 minutes, 59 seconds into overtime to lift the Philadelphia Flyers past Chicago 4-3 on Wednesday, trimming their deficit in the Stanley Cup Final to 2-1.
The Flyers will try to level the best-of-seven championship series in Game 4 today, with Game 5 set for Sunday in Chicago, where the Blackhawks won the opening two games.
Giroux deflected Matt Carle’s pass behind Chicago goaltender Antti Niemi to give the Flyers the third one-goal victory of the series, snapping the Blackhawks’ seven-game winning streak and seven-game road winning streak.
PHOTO: AFP
“I just tried to get a stick on it and it trickled in,” Giroux said.
Even though the Flyers had rallied from a three-game deficit to advance earlier in the playoffs, they did not relish their chances of claiming the Stanley Cup had they fallen behind the Blackhawks by the same margin.
“The whole team just showed up. We really wanted that win,” Giroux said. “Desperation was the key word. It was almost do or die, 3-0 or 2-1. Our fans really gave us a boost. Now we’ve got to regroup in two days for Game 4.”
The Blackhawks are trying to snap the NHL’s longest title drought, having not won the Cup since 1961.
Danny Briere opened the scoring with a power-play goal 15 minutes into the game, but Chicago’s Duncan Keith answered 2 minutes, 49 seconds into the second period. Scott Hartnell scored 7 minutes, 6 seconds later, but Brent Sopel made it 2-2 eight minutes after that.
Patrick Kane gave the Blackhawks their first lead of ther night just 2 minutes, 50 seconds into the third period, but Ville Leino equalized just 20 seconds later off a pass from Giroux.
“It’s awesome. We’re back in the series now,” Leino said. “We’ve got a lot of self-confidence. It’s wonderful. It’s going to be awesome Friday. We just have to carry it into Friday.”
The Flyers had thought they had won a few minutes earlier in overtime when they celebrated a goal, only for the video replay to show that the puck had slid across the goal-line, but never fully crossed for the winner.
“I’m glad we scored really quickly after that,” Flyers coach Peter Laviolette said. “You think it’s over and you keep playing. It’s tight out there. There’s not as much room to create out there offensively.”
Briere could joke about it in the locker room.
“That was a very good feeling. We got to celebrate a couple times in overtime,” he said. “We created so much. It was just a matter of time. Even when that goal got called back, it was just a matter of time. We had to keep firing the puck at the net and good things would happen.”
“We can enjoy it tonight, but we have to realize it’s just one step in the right direction,” he said. “We needed that game more than anything.”
Chicago coach Joel Quenneville could only wonder what might have been after two strong periods had they kept the lead longer in the third.
“We lost a lot of momentum right away, didn’t get a lot of shifts playing with the lead,” he said. “In overtime, we had a couple of good chances, good looks in there, and that’s just what happens in OT. The first 40 minutes we played like we wanted. We did some good things. We battled back. It’s one of those games that could have gone either way.”
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