Play, rest, play. Over and over, times 13.
Worked harder than any NHL playoff team, with 13 games in 25 days, plus four flights to California, the Nashville Predators earned something very valuable with their third elimination-game victory of the post-season on Monday night: an extra day of rest.
Viktor Arvidsson’s first playoff goal at 2 minutes, 3 seconds of overtime gave Nashville a 4-3 win over the San Jose Sharks at raucous Bridgestone Arena, evening the teams’ best-of-seven Western Conference semi-final at three games each.
Game 7 is scheduled for tomorrow night, thanks to a Selena Gomez concert on Wednesday night at SAP Center in San Jose. It will be the first time in the post-season that the Predators have had two days between games, something coach Peter Laviolette is willing to accept in exchange for the momentum of playing after just one day off.
“It’s just been non-stop for us with a game every other day and then the travel,” Laviolette said. “I feel like that break is going to give us the extra punch for Game 7. The extra day off is important.”
A Sharks goal in overtime would have given Nashville about four months off. Instead, Arvidsson, streaking down the left wing with a pass from Miikka Salomaki, roofed a backhander that appeared to deflect off goalie Martin Jones’ shoulder.
It was the Predators’ second overtime win of the series.
This one required far less exertion than Mike Fisher’s Game 4 winner at 11:12 of the third overtime tomorrow night, a fact gleefully noted by Colin Wilson.
“I get to sleep at a normal hour tonight,” Wilson said.
It was Wilson who forced extra hockey with his fifth post-season goal at 12:44 of the third period. Standing at the left goalpost, he merely had to tap in James Neal’s sweet diagonal pass from the right faceoff circle.
Wilson’s marker came less than three minutes after San Jose captured a 3-2 lead, courtesy of Logan Couture’s power-play tally on a wrister from the left faceoff circle. Predators goalie Pekka Rinne appeared to stumble as he tried to move from right to left to stop the shot.
However, Rinne, who faced just 18 shots, delivered a clutch stop on Joonas Donskoi’s dangerous wrister in the first minute of overtime. Arvidsson followed with his goal and then an uncertain reaction.
“The crowd went crazy and I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “It was nice to see it go in.”
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