SCOREBOARD
Saturday, June 2
Anaheim at Ottawa (8 p.m. EDT). The Senators will have the home-ice advantage as they look to bounce back from an 0-2 series deficit.
KEEPING IT CLOSE
Anaheim posted its second straight one-goal win of the Stanley Cup finals with a 1-0 victory over Ottawa in Game 2 on Wednesday night. It was the Ducks’ 11th one-goal victory of 13 such games – one win shy of the playoff record shared by Anaheim (2003) and Montreal (1993) – and second of this series.
COMEBACK
Ottawa will have to bounce back after losing the first two games of the Stanley Cup finals at Anaheim. Only once in 30 chances has the road team dropped the first two games and rallied to take the Cup. The only team to win the championship after trailing 2-0 on the road was the 1971 Montreal Canadiens, who beat the Chicago Blackhawks in seven games.
RATINGS
The Stanley Cup finals lost nearly a quarter of what already was a small television audience. Through two games, the Stanley Cup finals averaged a 0.7 rating, down 22 percent from last year’s 0.9, and households are down 20 percent, to 485,000 from 606,000 last year. The first two games were shown on Versus with the remainder of the series to be broadcast by NBC, starting with Game 3 at Ottawa on Saturday night.
CAPTAIN CROSBY
Pittsburgh gave Sidney Crosby the long-anticipated title of captain Thursday, making him the youngest to wear the captain’s C on his sweater. Already the youngest player in NHL history to get 100 points in a season and to win a scoring title, Crosby was 19 years and 297 days old when he became a captain. The youngest captain in league history was Tampa Bay’s Vincent Lecavalier (19 years, 324 days).
SPEAKING
“We’ve got nothing to lose. Nobody expects us to come back now except for the guys in the room. We have to use that world-beater mentality. We feel like we’re still in this series, and anybody who writes us off is crazy. We have to prove that.” – Ottawa center Jason Spezza. The Senators trail Anaheim 2-0 in the Stanley Cup finals.