On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- The Leafs won! And also some other stuff happened
- We go through the four second-round series
- What's next for the eight losers
- Sutter fired, Quenneville maybe back, draft lottery, Snoop Dogg and more...
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The trade deadline has passed, it’s still another month before the playoffs, I’m bored and the mailbag is overflowing. Let’s get weird.
Note: Submitted questions have been edited for clarity and style.
Which current coach would win in a 32-man fight held today? – A lot of you, as it turns out.
OK, I guess we have to do this.
If you’re not on Twitter, first of all congratulations on your life choices, and also you would have missed me tweeting this a few days ago:
I try very very hard not to get baited by silly infographics from marketing companies that are clearly based on nothing, but this one is an all-timer. pic.twitter.com/AJfVhKHSGh
— Down Goes Brown (@DownGoesBrown) March 24, 2022
The list came from one of those weird pages where some marketing firm churns out a few low-calorie infographics in hope of getting some free web site traffic, and I guess this one worked. But now people want to know what a real list of fight-worthy NHL coaches would look like, and apparently they think I’m the one to provide it.
I can’t claim to know the answer here, because I have never fought a real NHL coach and I’m pretty sure I’d have about as much success as Harvey the Hound if I ever tried. If one of these guys ever swung at me, my chin would make early-90s Doug Gilmour look like Chris Rock. I like a good laugh as much as anyone, but I’m not getting put through a table by Bruce Boudreau at the draft just you can have some internet giggles.
Luckily, I don’t have to, because you all gave me the answers in your replies to my tweet. So based on your feedback, and with just a little of my own sprinkled in, here’s how this would play out. In tribute to Craig Custance, we’ll do it in tiers.
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This was kind of a weird weekend. There wasn’t one giant story that dwarfed everything else – no blockbuster trades, no coaches or GMs fired, no huge controversies to yell at each other about. But it wasn’t a quiet weekend either, and in fact there was almost too much going on to cover it all in depth.
So instead, let’s fall back to the overwhelmed sportswriter’s best friend and break out the bullet points, as we cover some of the weekend’s stories in a lightning round. (Not to be confused with a Lightning round, which is the Stanley Cup final).
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On this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- The NHL returns to ESPN
- Why the last TV deal was a disaster, and why it's not (completely) Gary Bettman's fault
- A long argument about the Tom Wilson suspension
- Thoughts on Darryl Sutter resurfacing in Calgary
- The league reportedly wants to tweak the lottery rules
- OUFL on NHL team logos
- And more...
>> Stream it now:
>> Or, listen on The Athletic or subscribe on iTunes.
>> Get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.
We had a running joke around these parts in the opening weeks of the season: It was always too early. Nobody knew anything, no conclusions could be drawn, we probably shouldn’t have been ranking anyone but it was all in good fun.
We’re almost two full months in to the season and [looks around the flaming wreckage of the league] yeah, I think it’s safe to say it’s not too early anymore. And for a lot of teams, none of this is fun anymore.
Where to begin. Let’s start with some good news: The Canadiens had what may have been their first genuinely good game in a month, rolling the Jets 7-1 on Saturday. The win was their first in three weeks that didn’t feature somebody getting fired in the middle of it, so that’s progress.
Montreal’s week turned down the temperature slightly on a season that was in danger of falling apart. It also saw them lose their distinction as the only team to fire a coach during the season, as the Flames joined that club by icing Geoff Ward in favor of Darryl Sutter. Yes, that Darryl Sutter, the one who led the team to a Stanley Cup final back in the pre-cap days and won two rings in Los Angeles but hasn’t been behind a bench since 2017. This is GM Brad Treliving’s fifth coach of his tenure, and if the change doesn’t spark something, you have to wonder if it’s the last.
Sutter wasn’t behind the bench on the weekend due to COVID protocols, but is expected to join the team today. He presumably watched his new team cough up a 2-1 third period lead to lose to the Oilers in regulation on Saturday before getting a point in a shootout loss to Ottawa last night. He’ll inherit a team that hasn’t won two straight in four weeks, dropping X points back of a Montreal team that holds three games in hand for the North’s final playoff spot.
Here’s the thing: There are a lot of teams who’d look at the Flames right now and think “Man, I wish we had it that good.”
The weekend started with dueling GM press conferences in Buffalo and Vancouver, two teams that entered the league together five decades ago and have managed to wind up in virtually the same spot today. Two furious fan bases, two coaches on the hot seat, and now two GMs trying to buy some time. Kevyn Adams went with the “not good enough” approach, but his lukewarm defense of Ralph Krueger only made a change behind the bench feel even more inevitable. As for Jim Benning’s request for two more years of patience in Vancouver, well, I’ll let Thomas Drance take a carving knife to that performance.
Look around the league, and the hits keep on coming. The Devils have forgotten how to score. The Predators are ready to burn it all to the ground. It’s starting to fall apart in Columbus, and we’ll get to that down below. The Stars can’t get right, the Oilers are still trying to figure out what happened against the Leafs, the Sharks still can’t get a save… about a third of this league is a serious bummer right now.
History tells us that a few of those teams will find their footing and make something out of the season, even if that just means a failed playoff run. Others will make changes in the coming days and weeks. Some will insist on staying the course all the way to the bitter end. And they’ll be joined by others, the ones that save their collapse for the second half.
It’s depressing if you root for one of those teams, and maybe a certain kind of entertaining if you don’t. It’s a lot of things. But it’s not too early. Not anymore.
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The NHL had its first coaching change of the season last week, and it was big news for a couple of reasons. Most importantly, it was Montreal, and anything that happens in that market will reverberate around the league. But it also broke the seal on a year that had many of us wondering if there would be any midseason changes at all. With a pandemic still raging and a condensed schedule leaving little room to adjust, would teams be tempted to ride out the year and make their coaching decisions in the offseason?
Apparently not. Instead, we got what we almost always get – at least one team deciding that it had to make a change during the season, with more potentially on the way. Since the expansion era began in 1967, the 2017-18 season remains the only one which hasn’t had at least one midseason coaching change. Sometimes, the change works out brilliantly. Other times, a struggling team keeps spinning their wheels. Occasionally, a poorly thought-out switch makes a bad situation even worse.
So today, let’s look back at every midseason coaching change of the cap era. That’s a total of 67, by my count, not including brief interim stints or temporary absences. We can divide them into some familiar categories. And of course, we’ll rank them from the worst midseason change of the era to the very best, with the benefit of hindsight.
We’ll start at the bottom and work our way up. Anyone know the number for a cab?
I’m guessing there’s no big surprise with this pick…
#67. Nov. 27, 2016: Panthers replace Gerard Gallant with Tom Rowe
You at least can sort of see what the Panthers were going for. They’d recently transitioned the front office job from Dale Tallon to Rowe, and new GMs often want to bring in their own guy. Rowe was embracing a more analytics-based mindset – this was what would become derisively known in Florida as the era of the Computer Boys – and Gallant didn’t seem to be fully on board. So despite coming off a 103-point season in which Gallant was Jack Adams runner-up and a disappointing-but-not-awful 11-10-1 record through 22 games, Rowe pulled the trigger and named himself interim coach for the rest of the year.
Oh, and then they didn’t call Gallant a cab, which turned into a league-wide punch line and infuriated the old guard.
Presumably, the idea was for Rowe to make it through the season, see what his roster looked like up close, and then hire his own guy in the spring. Instead, the team missed the playoffs, Rowe lost a front office power struggle, and Tallon was put back in charge. Meanwhile, Gallant took the expansion Golden Knights job and won the Jack Adams in his first season in Vegas. Just a complete mess all around.
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Cayden Primeau made his NHL debut last week, playing goal for the Montreal Canadiens two years after being drafted in the seventh round. It’s a great story, especially when you remember that Primeau’s father Keith was a longtime NHLer. Keith’s brother Wayne also played in the league, which was nice for them except for that time that it wasn’t.
Battling brothers. Proud fathers and sons. It feels like there’s a story idea in there somewhere. And luckily, one reader found it for me:
Now that Primeau has started as an NHL goalie, @DownGoesBrown what is your best complete father-son team vs the best complete sibling team? Dick Irvine Sr is the father-son coach with JR calling the game and a Sutter can coach the sibling team. And who would win?
— Dr. Lee Skallerup Bessette (@readywriting) December 6, 2019
Oh hell yes, we’re doing that. Thank you, Lee. (And thanks to everyone else who takes the time to send me weird YouTube clips, obscure trivia and ideas for bizarre stories nobody else would write. You are all the greatest.)
Team Father/Son vs. Team Brother, from all of NHL history. Which side can build the best team? Let’s do this.
But first, as always, some ground rules:
OK, let’s make this happen. We’ll start up front with the top lines, which means both sides are breaking out their big guns.
Team Brother: Phil Esposito, Maurice Richard, Frank Mahovlich
Team Father/Son: Gordie Howe, Bobby Hull, Peter Stastny
Yikes. Good luck to anyone trying to shut down either unit; you could make a good case that we’ve got four of the top ten players in hockey history here. That includes Howe, the single greatest player we’ll find on either roster, which gives Team Father/Son a strong start. Mr. Hockey and the Golden Jet together would be close to unstoppable, with a combined 1,400 NHL goals between just two guys (and nearly 500 more if we count the WHA). But they’re facing a killer trio from Team Brother, with the first 50-goal scorer, the first 100-point player and the Big M there to feed them both.
Stastny is notable for a few reasons. For one, he’s the weak link on Team Father/Son’s top line, which isn’t exactly an insult given who he’s playing with. But more importantly, you may be questioning why he’s even on Team Father/Son at all. You could absolutely put him on Team Brother instead, on a line with Anton and Marian. Having run through the various combinations, he ends up fitting a bit better on Team Father/Son, but there may not be a player in league history who presents a tougher call.
Team Brother: Henrik Sedin, Daniel Sedin, Henri Richard
Team Father/Son: Brett Hull, Zach Parise, J.P. Parise
Both teams have some decent scoring depth. There’s more balance on Team Brother, with three Hall-of-Famers. But Team Father/Son has the most dominant player in Hull and his 741 goals, plus a pair of All-Stars who saw action in some of the most important international tournaments ever played.
Also, a quick clerical matter: We made the call to deny Team Father/Son eligibility to Howie Morenz and Bernie Geoffrion; Howie was Boom Boom’s father-in-law, which doesn’t quite fit the spirit of the thing. Any complaints or challenges can be filed with the official Down Goes Brown Office of Appeals (my trashcan).
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In the Friday Grab Bag:
- We need more rivalries like Doughty/Tkachuk and I have an idea on how we can get them
- Please tell me I'm not the only one developing trust issues when shots hit the post
- An obscure player who knew how to put on a show
- The week's three comedy stars
- And happier time for the San Jose Sharks (their goalie taking a slapshot to the pills)
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In this week's episode of the Puck Soup podcast:
- We try to figure out what the deal was with the Sebastian Aho offer sheet
- One of us thinks the Habs did a good thing; two of us do not
- Rounding up the rest of the free agency action
- Our thoughts on the big Leafs/Avalanche trade
- Greg and Ryan get into a heated argument over Joe Pavelski, Ben Bishop and the Stars
- Darryl Sutter joiins the Duck
- Something about Spiderman that I didn't pay attention to
- Plus Paul Fenton's weird comments about lizards and lots more...
>> Stream it now:
>> Or, subscribe on iTunes.
>> This is the final free episode of Puck Soup for the summer, but you can still get weekly mailbags and special bonus episodes by supporting Puck Soup on Patreon for $5.
The NHL off-season got a jolt Monday with a surprise out of Washington: Head coach Barry Trotz will be heading elsewhere after handing in his resignation.
That’s surprising on several fronts, not least of which is that we didn’t know Trotz could resign in the first place – we’d been led to believe that his contract was about to expire. As it turns out, his old deal included an automatic extension that kicked in when the Capitals won the Stanley Cup. That new deal wasn’t to Trotz’s liking, and attempts to negotiate a new deal were unsuccessful, so Trotz walked away.
That’s a relatively rare occurrence in a league where coaches are far more likely to be relieved of their duties, often with a footprint on their behind. But it’s been a bit of a theme this off-season, as Trotz becomes the third NHL head coach to voluntarily leave his job. In April, Dallas coach Ken Hitchcock announced his retirement. And a week later, Bill Peters resigned as coach of the Hurricanes.
Peters landed on his feet, taking the Calgary job within days. It seems safe to assume that Trotz will also find new work quickly. If so, he’ll become the first coach in 24 years to leave a team he just won the Stanley Cup and take a job somewhere else.
Making the choice to quit an NHL job is rare. But it’s not completely unheard of. So today, let’s look back on 10 other head coaches who walked away from a job, and how that worked out for them. We’ll start with that last Cup winner to do it, since it involves one of the great off-season soap operas in modern NHL history.
Imagine you’d just led an Original Six team to its first championship in 54 years. You’re the toast of the town. What’s your next move?
If you said “Find a loophole in your contract, declare yourself a free agent and announce you’ve just signed a five-year contract with a different team,” then you and Mike Keenan would probably get along great.
The whole mess started in July 1994, just days after Keenan had led the Rangers to a Game 7 victory over the Canucks to finally put an end the “1940” chants once and for all. Rather than rest on his laurels, Keenan got to work checking the fine print on his contract. When he realized the Rangers had been a day late on a bonus payment, he publicly declared that his contract was null and void. Two days later, he’d signed a five-year deal to become the coach and GM in St. Louis.
Needless to say, the Rangers weren’t thrilled. GM Neil Smith acknowledged the late payment, but called it a “clerical error” and the team went to court to try to prevent Keenan’s jump. (The court filing referred to Keenan as a “faithless employee,” and you have to admit they kind of had a point.) Gary Bettman became involved, in what was viewed as the first major crisis of his relatively young stint as commissioner.
Eventually, the Blues and Rangers agreed to a trade that sent Petr Nedved to New York in exchange for Esa Tikkanen, Doug Lidster and the rights to Keenan. Bettman approved the deal, but fined just about everyone (including the Red Wings, who’d also been negotiating with Keenan). He also suspended Keenan for 60 days.
Keenan got to work in St. Louis, assembling one of the most interesting teams in modern history. He also traded for Wayne Gretzky. Hey, speaking of which…
It would be hard to call Gretzky’s resignation as Coyotes coach a major surprise, since there had been subtle signs that he was unhappy in Phoenix. Like, for example, the fact the Coyotes were weeks into training camp and Gretzky hadn’t shown up yet.
The backstory here isn’t all that complicated. The Coyotes had filed for bankruptcy earlier in the year, and an ownership battle was being waged in court between the league and Jim Balsillie. With Gretzky making a reported league-high $8.5 million as the team’s coach (among other roles), the numbers didn’t add up – especially given that he’d missed the playoffs in all four years behind the bench. When it became apparent that neither Balsillie or the league intended to retain his services, Gretzky stayed home and eventually announced his decision to walk away.
The Coyotes announced the hiring of Dave Tippett and moved on. Gretzky ended up in an extended battle with the league over money he was owed that dragged on for years. He never coached again, and at this point everyone has politely agreed to forget all this ever happened.
In the Friday Grab Bag:
- In an important message for hockey fans of the future, I spell out the Ten Commandments of Adding More Replay Review
- The mysterious injury problem that's sweeping the league, just like it does every year
- An obscure player who snapped the longest goal-scoring drought ever
- The week's three comedy stars are homer-ific
- And a YouTube breakdown of the big brawl from the St. Patrick's Day Massacre. No, the other one.
In this week's episode of Biscuits, the Vice Sports hockey podcast:
- Holy crap, the Leafs actually made the playoffs
- Dave and I go through each of the first round series and make our predictions
- I get talked out of one of yesterday's Eastern Conference picks
- We talk NHL awards, and I unsuccessfully try to get Dave to fill out my ballot for me
- We have a conversation about coaching vacancies that is already out of date
- Things get very awkward with the last reader question of the day
>> Stream it now on Vice Sports
>> Or, subscribe on iTunes.
I've always liked Jarome Iginla. I'm not sure I know anyone who doesn't. Even if he never played for your favorite team, he's one of those guys that you have to at the very least respect, if not outright admire. He'd be on pretty much any list of my favorite players of the last few decades.
And so, it goes without saying, Saturday night made me sad.
That was the night that Iginla celebrated his 1,500th regular season game. It's a major milestone, one that only 15 other players have reached. And Iginla got to spend that historic game getting pummeled in a 10-1 loss to the Canadiens.
The Avalanche are awful this year, and while a struggling Iginla hasn't helped much, he deserves better. So let's figure out a way to set him free. It seems like a good day for it — Iginla and the Avs are in action tonight, and two of his former teams, the Penguins and Bruins, are facing each other. And the team he started his NHL career with is even in action too, as the Flames face the Lightning. Maybe they'll even count all the goals this time.
So it's pretty much Jarome Iginla night in the NHL. In his honor, let's run down the five best destinations for when he inevitably waives his no-trade clause in the leadup to this year's trade deadline.
To be fair, these aren't necessarily the best destinations for Iginla himself, but rather the ones that would be the most entertaining for us, the fans. Still, he'd go into this year's playoffs as perhaps the best Old Guy Without A Cup story since Ray Bourque, so it's important that we get this right.
Let's begin, fittingly, where it all began.
The irresistible narrative: The team that drafted Iginla and then traded him away before his first game all those years ago brings him back into the fold just in time to win a Cup.
Could it happen? OK, there's a glaring problem with this idea that I'm sure you're already muttering about: The Stars don't need offense. They're struggling this year because their goaltending is shaky and their blueline misses Alex Goligoski more than anyone thought. The forwards are banged up, sure, but once everyone is healthy the Stars will be fine when it comes to scoring. It's keeping the puck out that's been the problem.
And yet… hockey is a game of outscoring your opponent, right? Sure, ideally Jim Nill would be able to go out and get a Ben Bishop or a Kevin Shattenkirk instead. But if those deals don't materialize, there's always plan B. A 6-5 win is still a win, after all, even in the playoffs. And it's not like Iginla is some flashy perimeter guy who'll wilt from the post-season grind.
The last time the Dallas Stars made a Jarome Iginla trade, it led to a Stanley Cup. It could happen again.
In this week's grab bag:
- The Steven Stamkos decision is going to be insufferable
- An Christmas-themed obscure player trips up a legend
- An unwritten rule for hockey announcers following a fight
- The week's three comedy star
- And the 1984 Flyers would like to read you a Christmas poem
It took less than three weeks for the NHL season to claim its first coaching casualty. Yesterday, the Blue Jackets announced they’d fired Todd Richards after a disastrous 0-7-0 start, one that threatens to all but eliminate Columbus from the playoff race before the calendar has even flipped to November.
Richards will be replaced by John Tortorella, which is … interesting. Tortorella has a Cup ring, although you have to go back to the pre-cap era to find it, and he had some success with the Rangers. But he wore out his welcome in New York, and his one-year stint with the Canucks was a disaster. At the very least, his temperamental style could be a tough fit for a dressing room that was already miserable.
So now that the Richards watch is over, who’s next? The reality of life as an NHL coach is that you always seem to be just one bad slump away from hearing whispers about a pink slip with your name on it. It’s not a fun part of the business, but it’s part of the job that these guys sign up for. Here are a half-dozen other coaches whose seats are getting warm.
Why he’s in trouble: The Bruins went into the year as a tough team to figure out. They’re still icing essentially the same core that went to a Cup final just three years ago, so the talent is there for at least a playoff run, if not more. But after a disappointing playoff miss in 2014-15 was followed by a confusing offseason under new GM Don Sweeney, this felt like a team headed in the wrong direction.
So far, the results have been mixed. An 0-3-0 start had the makings of a disaster, but they’ve clawed back to 2-3-1. That’s at least respectable, if not playoff-worthy.
But Julien has bigger problems than the Bruins’ record. He was very nearly fired in the offseason, as the team fired Peter Chiarelli and left the coach’s fate up to the new GM amid rumors that Bruins president Cam Neely wanted him gone. And while Sweeney ultimately spared Julien, it was a decidedly lukewarm vote of confidence, and Julien is still the dreaded “holdover that the new GM didn’t hire.” It may be only a matter of time before Sweeney decides to bring in his own guy, and a skeptic might even suggest that the rookie GM is only keeping Julien around to give himself an extra card to play if the season goes bad.
What could save him: The obvious answer is winning, and that will be the case for every coach on this list. But while Julien will continue to buy time if he keeps the Bruins in the playoff race, it’s possible that even that won’t be enough. If he’s going to be the long-term answer in Boston, Julien will need to make sure he’s on the same page as Neely and Sweeney as far as their vision for the team’s future. Failing that, he’d better take the Bruins on a deep playoff run — and he probably hasn’t been given a good enough roster to make that happen.
How hot is it? 9/10. Sweeney and Neely have said all the right things, but it’s not hard to read between the lines.
Who could replace him: The usual suspects will be mentioned, but here’s a long shot to consider: former Devils coach Adam Oates. He’s a former Bruin and ex-teammate of both Sweeney and Neely (the latter scored 50 goals playing on a line with him). He even thanked both guys in his Hall of Fame speech. Being old pals with someone doesn’t necessarily make you the best candidate for the job, but it’s funny how often it works out that way in the hockey world.
Prediction: Julien hangs on longer than expected, but he gets the pink slip late in the year as the Bruins fall out of the race. Sweeney names an interim coach to close out the season, then chases a big name in the spring.
Why he’s in trouble: The Ducks are firmly in win-now mode, and they came into the season looking like they’d do just that, with many of the so-called experts (including me) picking them as Western Conference champs.
But while there was plenty of optimism around the Ducks, it always came with a “but” attached — as in, “but wait until we see what they do in the playoffs.” The Ducks have won three straight division titles, but they have seen each of those years end in a disappointing Game 7 loss. That includes last year’s conference final loss to the Hawks, one in which they blew a 3-2 series lead with a pair of bad losses.
Fair or not, a lot of that disappointment has come to rest at the feet of Boudreau, who had some similarly dominant regular-season teams in Washington that never got over the hump in the playoffs. He’s now firmly saddled with the reputation of a guy who can’t win the big one. Those raps are almost always arbitrary and unfair, and it only takes one successful run to erase them forever. But Boudreau hasn’t had that run yet, and with so many chips already in the middle of the table, the Ducks could be running out of patience.
To make matters worse, the Ducks stumbled out of the gate with an 0-3-1 record, managing just a single goal in the process. That switched the narrative from “Boudreau needs to win in the playoffs” to “Boudreau might not even make it that far.” An impressive win over the Wild on Sunday relieved some pressure, but now the Ducks have a brutal five-game road trip against Central heavyweights.
What could save him: In the short term, a few wins would do the trick. Long-term, Boudreau may need at least a trip to the final to keep his job.
How hot is it? 6/10. Let’s all take a breath. Boudreau has the best regular-season points percentage of any coach with at least 500 games — better than Bowman, Arbour, Quenneville, anyone. Firing him because he’s had some bad luck in Game 7s would be questionable; doing it after a few tough games in October would be madness.
Who could replace him: Speaking of madness, the rumor mill churned out a fun name this week: Randy Carlyle. That would be the same Carlyle the Ducks fired in 2011 to bring in Boudreau. He was last seen presiding over several disastrous Maple Leafs seasons, so he’d seem to be an odd choice for a second stint in Anaheim. And if you’re an analytics fan, replacing Boudreau with Carlyle would seem like utter insanity. But Carlyle is apparently still very well respected around the league, and it’s worth remembering that former Leafs GM Dave Nonis is now a consultant in Anaheim. Could it happen? It would be mind-boggling.
Prediction: If the Ducks fire Boudreau and bring in Carlyle, it ends in disaster. But I think Bob Murray is too smart for that, and that Boudreau gets at least one more playoff run behind the Anaheim bench.
In this week's grab bag:
- We play our annual round of "Do you actually understand how the wildcard works?"
- An obscure player who boasts a weird post-hockey invention that you see just about everyday
- Introducing a new word to describe the sinking feeling that your team's rivals for the last playoff spot will always play three-point games
- The week's three comedy stars
- And a YouTube review of the time the WWE tried its hand at hockey, as we relive the glory that was The Goon
On Saturday, they played a hockey game outdoors in California, and it says something about the evolution of the NHL that the whole thing didn’t seem all that remarkable.
That’s not supposed to be the case with these outdoor games, and it certainly wasn’t the case last year when the league set up shop at Dodger Stadium. That game felt like something wholly unique, with beach volleyball and a marching band and a performance by Kiss, as hockey fans across the continent tuned in to find out whether the ice would melt. It didn’t. In the end, it all came together perfectly.
This year’s game, played in front of just more than 70,000 fans at Levi’s Stadium, didn’t carry that same first-time curiosity factor, and that may help explain why there seemed to be so little buzz about it. Heading into Saturday, there was as much focus on the standings as on the setting. This was perhaps the league’s first outdoor game where the emphasis was firmly on the “game” part of the equation.
In the last decade, the state of California has won three Stanley Cups, one Presidents’ Trophy, and two MVPs, all while serving up the best three-way rivalry in the sport. The state’s teams have been so good for so long that fans around the league now warily eye their favorite team’s schedule for the dreaded California Road Trip of Doom.
So when it comes to California hockey, there’s an overwhelming temptation to ignore the past, because the present is just so much better. But you’d be missing out if you did, because the history of the NHL in California is rich and deep and completely ridiculous. And it was hard not to think about that on a Saturday night at a football stadium.
♦♦♦
The L.A. Kings arrived in 1967 as part of the NHL’s first wave of expansion, and they weren’t very good. In the ’70s, they were best known for helping to build the Canadiens’ dynasty by continually giving their top draft picks to Sam Pollock. In the ’80s, their main job was to be just competitive enough to occasionally make the powerhouse Oilers (and later Flames) break a sweat. And they looked ridiculous, wearing awful yellow and purple uniforms. If you squinted just right, it looked like Wayne Gretzky and friends were skating circles around a bunch of bruised bananas.
That Gretzky guy turned out to be pretty important a few years later, when he was traded to the Kings in 1988. That move put the Kings on the map. They switched to modern-looking black and silver uniforms, and suddenly, almost overnight, the Los Angeles Kings were cool. But it was an L.A. cool, and in hockey, that’s not a compliment. After all, you still had the B-list celebrities and Barry Melrose’s mullet and that blue bandanna thing that Kelly Hrudey wore.
For most of their first four decades, the Kings were one big punch line. Two Stanley Cups later, nobody’s laughing anymore.
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The San Jose Sharks entered the league in 1991 as a quasi expansion team, part of a complicated split from the Minnesota North Stars that nobody really seemed to fully understand. They played in something called the Cow Palace, took to the ice by skating through a giant shark’s head, and introduced the word “teal” to the hockey world’s vocabulary.
They were also terrible. They finished dead last in each of their first two years, establishing a league record for most losses in a season in 1992-93. But they made the playoffs in 1994 and even won a round thanks to Chris Osgood’s brain cramp. That would start a run of 17 playoff appearances in 20 years. They’ve won six division titles and had seven 100-point seasons.
They’ve also never lost a Stanley Cup final game, which sounds nice except that they’ve never won one either. That’s the reputation the Sharks have forged over two decades: Year after year, they’re good in the regular season and then find a way to fall apart in the playoffs.
And that brings us back to the Los Angeles Kings.
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Until very recently, the Kings had spent the entire season desperately trying to look like a bad team and not fooling anyone.
When the matchup between the Sharks and Kings was announced last summer, it was projected as a grudge match between two of the league’s elite teams. The Kings are the defending champions. The Sharks have been one of the league’s top regular-season teams for more than a decade but just can’t get over the hump in the playoffs, and in each of the last two years that hump has been the Kings. These were two very good teams that didn’t like each other very much. That was the plan.
The first part of that plan hasn’t really worked out. Both teams have struggled, and instead of Saturday’s game being a showdown for top spot in the Pacific, it was a battle for the conference’s final wild-card spot. Despite a six-game winning streak, the Kings went into the weekend having lost more games than they’d won. They’ve been chasing a playoff spot for most of the last few months. And yet nobody seems to want to count them out, because they’ve been down this road before in 2012 and 2014, and we know how that turned out. A few Stanley Cup rings will buy you some benefit of the doubt.
In the season's final grab bag:
- Comedy stars, this time not featuring Darryl Sutter
- Free agency will be terrible and your favorite team is going to screw it up
- An obscure player that Leaf fans may want to skip
- I miss Ron MacLean's cheesy NHL award comedy skits
- And new Hall of Famers Pat Burns and Bill McCreary face aoff in a towel-waving showdown in the YouTube breakdown
In the grab bag:
- Debating whether coaches and players should speak nicely to the media
- In honor of the World Cup, an obscure player who may have been the greatest soccer player in NHL history
- Comedy all-stars, including topless Darryl Sutter
- What it's like to be on the ice after the Stanley Cup is handed out
- Capgeek trend tool sadness
- And an army of creepy children pay tribute to hockey heroes at the NHL Awards
>> Read the full post on Grantland
The Kings will parade the Stanley Cup through Los Angeles today, after earning the title by beating the Rangers on Friday night. You’ve seen the highlight by now — defenseman Alec Martinez jumping into the rush, then burying a rebound to end the game and make the Kings the first team in 34 years to win the Cup in overtime on their home ice. The goal ended the series in five remarkably close games, marking the third time in the final that the Kings beat New York in sudden death.
The win didn’t come as much of a surprise; just two years removed from a championship in 2012, the Kings weren’t exactly a long-shot pick heading into this year’s postseason, and by the time they reached the final they’d established themselves as the favorite.
But while the end result was predictable, the path the Kings followed to get there was not. In fact, the team spent much of the season defying conventional wisdom about how championship teams are supposed to be built. And in doing so, the Los Angeles Kings became the not-supposed-to Stanley Cup champs.
You’re not supposed to come back from down 3-0 in a series. Let’s start there, because it’s where the Kings themselves started, almost eight weeks ago. They opened the playoffs against the San Jose Sharks, a regular-season powerhouse who’d finished 11 points ahead of them in the standings. The Sharks won the first two games in San Jose, pummeling the Kings by scores of 6-3 and 7-2, and then took Game 3 in Los Angeles on a Patrick Marleau overtime winner that should have ended the Kings’ run before it ever really began.
Here’s one of those dirty little secrets of playoff hockey: When a series gets to 3-0, we all close the book. It’s over. We can’t say that out loud, because hey, anything can happen, right? Well, no, it’s can’t, we think to ourselves, and history has shown that we’re almost always right. When the horn sounds on Game 3 and it’s the same team celebrating for the third time in a row, we lift up the losing team by the scruff of its neck and gently place it into a pile labeled “Done.”
But the Kings crawled out of the pile and kept on, staving off elimination with a Game 4 win. There was talk last week of players later telling people that they left the ice after that game already knowing they had the series won, and Drew Doughty came right out said that they could see the panic in the Sharks players’ eyes. There’s probably more than a little bit of revisionist history going on here, but you know what they say about the winners and the history books.
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