Friday offers a chance to catch your breath as the championship pace of daily sports takes a break after last night’s exciting Game 7 of the NBA Finals in Miami. The Heat are in the books as champions, and the Stanley Cup Final doesn’t resume until Saturday when the Boston Bruins and Chicago Blackhawks play Game 5.
The National League West has been the division of surprises so far in 2013. We’ve had the Los Angeles Dodgers flopping and the Colorado Rockies winning. But overlooked has been the San Diego Padres. Don’t look now, but coming into Thursday’s games, the Padres were right at the .500 mark, 36-36 and that’s good enough to be within three games of the first-place Arizona Diamondbacks.
The Toronto Blue Jays have endured a mostly rough first half of the season after a series of high-profile acquisitions in the offseason made them the favorite to win the AL East. Injuries and underperformance followed, and the Blue Jays spent the bulk of the first half running away with the division, but in the opposite direction.
After two consecutive grinding, defensive-oriented games, the ice opened up in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals last night in Boston, and the Chicago Blackhawks won a wide-open goalfest 6-5, as the series saw its third game go to overtime. Chicago evened the series two games apiece, and while reclaiming home ice doesn’t have the same impact in hockey that it does in the NBA, the Blackhawks can now win the Cup by winning Games 5 & 7 in front of their home fans in the Windy City.
There’s only one game that matters in the daily sports docket for Thursday, and it’s the last Battle In Miami, as the Heat and the San Antonio Spurs meet in Game 7 of the NBA Finals, at 9 PM ET on ABC.
Wow! That’s about the only word I could muster in watching Game 6 of the NBA Finals unfold. Miami got the final “wow!” of regulation when Ray Allen hit a game-tying three-pointer, and they got the final “wow!” at the end when they barely hung on in overtime, winning 103-100 and forcing a decisive Game 7 for the NBA championship on Thursday night (9 PM ET, ABC).
The Boston Bruins are on home ice, and looking to take a commanding 3-1 series lead in the Stanley Cup Finals tonight against the Chicago Blackhawks. The historical track record of Finals suggests that while Game 3 per se doesn’t mean a whole lot, coming from 3-1 down hasn’t happened since 1942, at least not […]
Unlike the first two games, which were fraught with missed opportunities, intrigue and storylines layered upon one another, this was pretty straightforward. While it would be a stretch to say the Bruins dominated, they maintained reasonable control of the game, got both goals in the second period and then coasted in relatively free of drama.
The legacy of LeBron James begins a two-part test tonight in Game 6 of the NBA Finals. If the Miami Heat lose tonight, and the San Antonio Spurs wrap up the NBA title in six games the blame in this series will be placed on LeBron’s shoulders. Unlike a lot of cases, where that blame is woefully misplaced and rooted in absurd expectations, there’s no denying that LeBron’s on-again, off-again play is the biggest reason his team has lost three of the first five games to the Spurs.
The 2013 NBA Finals continue on their trajectory to be the best bad series ever played. Once again, the Miami Heat and San Antonio Spurs tantalized us with the promise of an exciting finish, only to see one team completely take over the game in the latter stages of the third quarter. This time it was San Antonio, who won Game 5 on their home floor in a not-as-close-as-it-sounds 114-104 win.
If the first two games of the Stanley Cup Finals have been any indication, get ready for a long Monday night. The Chicago Blackhawks and Boston Bruins hook up for Game 3 of the Finals, and the first two have seen a combined four overtime sessions. The series is tied at a game apiece, and tonight’s battle in Boston will begin at 8 PM ET on NBC Sports Network.
NBC is getting its money’s worth from these Stanley Cup Finals. After a three-overtime opener on Wednesday won by the Chicago Blackhawks, the network got another round of extra advertising time last night, as it took the Boston Bruins nearly fifteen minutes into overtime to get a 2-1 win that evens the series.