Friday, June 12 marked the final game of the series in two teams’ quest for the 2009 NHL Stanley Cup. The Pittsburgh Penguins (#pens) and the Detroit Red Wings (#redwings) battled line to line for 60 minutes, but their fans were also battling: on Twitter.

Early on NHL fans using Twitter began tweeting about their favorite teams using fairly standardized hashtags. Being veterans of the service, they understood how using hashtags could connect them to other fans. By following your team’s hashtag, you could easily seek out others using the same (or hashtags for sworn enemies) and follow/unfollow accordingly.

NHL hockey and hashtags

Although several NHL teams have joined Twitter and started tweeting highlights of the games, following your team’s hashtag still gives you an entirely different perspective. Just like watching the hashtag for an event, listening in on team hashtags is almost like being right there in the stands, minus the expensive food and drinks. You get to hear what other people are thinking or saying about the game, rather than what the loudspeaker is spouting or the announcer is rattling off.

What is interesting about hockey fans using Twitter during the Stanley Cup finals is that the number of hashtagged tweets supporting the Penguins seemed to grow with the team’s momentum. The Red Wings came sailing into game six straight off a 5-0 win over the Penguins, also leading hashtag chatter (as compared to the Penguins) for the entirety of game six. However, after the Penguins clenched a 2-1 win over the Red Wings in game six and forced a champion-determining game seven, the #pens tweets started to swell.

During the seventh game of the Stanley Cup finals series, Penguins fans out-tweeted Wings fans by 22%, helping to offset the 20,000 screaming fans inside Joe Louis arena, a majority of them rooting for the home team Red Wings.

How the Stanley Cup Finals played out

They say that teams draw off of the energy of the crowd, and it looks as if the Pittsburgh Penguins were able to do just that. The Penguins pulled off a strong 2-0 lead by the end of the second period, with the Red Wings only mustering the strength to match with one goal of their own in the third. The last few seconds of the game were a flurry of shots and a flying Fleury, but ultimately the Penguins emerged on top.

We can’t draw any official correlations between hashtags and hockey performance, but here’s to the #pens fans for helping tweet their team to victory.