Daily Sports: Showdown In Chicago

Sometimes the attraction of the daily sports schedule lies in its quantity—a Saturday afternoon of college football or basketball being a good example. And sometimes it’s about the quality of one big game. For example, a Game 7 where a heavy favorite has been pushed the limit by a team that might be an underdog, but has a storied history.

And if the two franchises are bitter rivals on top of it?  So much the better. Such as the case on Wednesday night, as the Chicago Blackhawks and Detroit Red Wings play the decisive game of their NHL Western Conference semi-final.

If you’re not into the hockey scene, MLB Network has baseball from the East Coast tonight. It’s either Red Sox-Phillies or Mets-Yankees in the 7 PM ET slot. And if you want to go beyond the game, the NFL Network has an interesting one-hour feature called “A Football Life”, about the late Reggie White and Jerome Brown. Both men were part of some outstanding Philadelphia Eagles’ defensive lines in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Brown was a feared player going all the way back to his days playing college ball at Miami. As for White, he was arguably the best defensive lineman ever to play the game, and would later go on to Green Bay and win a Super Bowl.

TheSportsNotebook will have NBA commentary coming up later today. We’ll look at the Indiana-Miami series, now that the Pacers have evened it up heading back to South Beach from Game 5. And we’ll celebrate San Antonio and look at how the Spurs swept Memphis home in the West.

Yesterday’s NHL analysis looked at both big Game 7s—the one tonight, as well as the one from last night, where Los Angeles nipped San Jose to advance. And our MLB coverage on Memorial Day summed up all thirty teams in a soundbite and did some modest reassessment of preseason playoff predictions.