The one thing we know about game sevens for sure,is like most sporting events, they are entirely unpredictable. Many sports fans feel they can get a sense of what might transpire in the final game of a playoff series, by measuring who they feel has the momentum coming out of game 6. That is the sports equivalent of fools gold. Don’t you dare buy it! Professional athletes are well trained to have short term memories. They are also conditioned from an early age, to not get too emotionally high after a win, and conversely, they are also counseled to not get too low after a loss.It is therefore completely useless to gauge a seventh game in advance,based on anything or everything that preceded it.
So you’re probably wondering if there is any way of calculating who might win or lose. I tend to go with the better team, while also being cognizant of injuries. I don’t have the statistics to draw any conclusions, but I’m not so sure that home ice, home court, or field, as may be the case, is much of a big factor, with the intensity of both teams. I doubt that a visiting club is intimidated. Some players might prefer the road, as the pressure of home advantage can perhaps be too much for an inexperienced team. A road team is not under any pressure to entertain the fans, as can sometimes be the case for the home side. Having said all of this, the exact opposite of everything I’ve stated, can also happen, and does.
The game sevens that I recall the most, involved the Toronto Maple Leafs, as that was the professional sports team that I could watch on TV the most often, at a time when there were no sports networks or sports channels. In the 1964 Stanley Cup finals, after winning game 6 in Detroit with Bob Baun’s overtime winner, scored on a broken ankle that had been frozen during the intermission, the Maple Leafs returned home to Maple Leaf Gardens, and won game 7 fairly easily, by a score of 4-0, to claim their third straight Stanley Cup championship. In 1978, Toronto faced the heavily favored New York Islanders in a game 7, at the Nassau County Coliseum on Long Island. The game went to overtime, and Lanny McDonald scored on breakaway to give the Leafs the shocking upset win. The Islanders would eventually win 4 Stanley Cups starting in 1980, but they were not yet ready in 1978, and didn’t have all the pieces in place, until they later acquired Butch Goring from the Los Angeles Kings. Toronto, after the 1978/79 season with the same team, would be completely dismantled at the direction of Harold Ballard, and the Maple Leafs of the early 1980’s,were not very exciting to watch. It would take Toronto a long time to recover. They didn’t have a strong team again until 1992-93, with Pat Burns behind the bench, and the players led by Wendel Clark and Doug Gilmour. The Maple Leafs played in three game 7’s, in the 1993 playoffs. The overtime win over Detroit at Joe Louis Arena, on Nikolai Borschevsky’s goal, was most memorable in the first round of the playoffs, because the Toronto win, was completely unexpected. The game 7 loss to the Los Angeles Kings at Maple Leaf Gardens, in the Western Conference finals, was somewhat surprising, as most thought home ice would favor the underdog Maple Leafs. Toronto suffered a heart breaking loss in Los Angeles during the game six overtime, which followed a still discussed blown call by referee Kerry Fraser, who failed to penalize Wayne Gretzky, for a high stick infraction on Toronto’s Doug Gilmour, prior to the overtime win by the Kings.
The lesson learned for game 7’s in any sport, is the same as everything else in life. Quite simply, expect the unexpected !