Duncan Keith put the Blackhawks up 1-0 inside three minutes left of the second period and that was all Chicago needed to win their third Stanley Cup in six years. There were plenty of hit posts and missed connections on both sides for Mike Emrick's final chance to shred his vocal cords this year, but it took a casually perfect pass from Patrick Kane and a juicy rebound from Ben Bishop to finally break the stalemate. They added one more late in the third period to push the score to 2-0 and lock up the series in six games.
With just over five minutes left, Kaner put the game away with a great one-timer off a no-look pass from Brad Richards. Tampa was getting some good pressure in the Hawks zone, but a broken stick led to a Chicago 3-on-2 with Brandon Saad, Richards, and Kane. Saad dropped the pick off to Richards, who waited as long as possible before passing across the ice to Kane for a beautiful goal.
The Lightning had their chances, though, and bad luck and bad eye-hand coordination did them in. Steven Stamkos had a breakaway chance against Corey Crawford, but the long pass was bouncing on edge nearly the whole way. Stamkos tried to buy time while getting it to settle down, but by the time he did, he was too close to Crawford and needed to roof it to make it anything of the chance and could only slam it into the pads.
Earlier in the game, Anton Stralman had an even better chance off a nifty pass from Jonathan Drouin. The puck was slightly elevated to get it between the Hawks sticks separating the two, but Stralman whiffed on the puck in front of an empty net.
Duncan Keith is pretty much guaranteed to win the Conn Smythe and Chelsea Dagger will be played approximately seven millions times tonight in Chicago.[NBC]
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