When NHL hockey gets down to the Stanley Cup Final it is always one of the coolest events in sports. This year for only the 15th time in hockey history the Stanley Cup Final comes down to a seventh and final game.
When the Pittsburg Penguins and the Detroit Red Wings fly onto the ice for game seven in Detroit on Friday June 12, it’ll be just like the dream that every kid who grew up playing hockey relived over and over again: One hockey game for all the glory. One game for the Stanley Cup.
“Here's an opportunity,” Red Wings head coach Mike Babcock said. “You have Game 7. You've got a chance, and that's when you ask the question about fear. I don't understand that thinking at all. To me this is all about you spend your whole life when you're a kid, at least in Canada, when you don't even have a net, you've got little snow piles on the street. You're dreaming of scoring the game-winning goal of Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final. You've been doing that your whole life. Now you've got it. Play and have some fun.”
This is the second season in a row that the Penguins and the Red Wings have met in the final. The Red Wings won the Stanley Cup in six games last season. However, the Penguins held on for a 2-1 win at home in game six this year behind the incredible goaltending of Marc-Andre Fleury.
Fleury stopped a point blank shot on a breakaway by Detroit’s Dan Cleary with just 1:41 left in the third period that saved the day for the Penguins, giving them at least a chance to do the unthinkable: Win Game 7 on the road.
"I knew that could be a turning point if I could make the save," Fleury said. "At first I was kind of thinking about forechecking. But I tried to be patient and wait for him to make the first move, and I got a piece of it."
Of the last seven game sevens played in the Stanley Cup Final, all seven have been won by the home team. In fact, no away team in all of professional sports has won a game seven final on the road since the Pittsburg Pirates did it in the World Series in 1979.
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