Best is yet to come in Kings-Devils series
Posted June 4, 2012 9:14 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
We are inclined, in a series where there have been exactly four goals scored in 120 minutes of regulation hockey, to think that the best is yet to come.
You know us sportswriters, we’re a gleeful lot. The glass is always half-full.
So we’re hoping that somehow, despite the very close resemblance to those previous three playoff series where the Los Angeles Kings won two on the road and cruised home from there, that this is different. Because this, of course, is the Stanley Cup final.
It is not supposed to be this easy.
And it turns out there was a team talking about how it can play a lot better here in California, where the series has shifted. The problem is, that team was Los Angeles.
“We haven’t been as sharp as we could have been in our last two games,” said defenceman Matt Greene. “(The Kings can be) crisper in our execution, our break out, our neutral zone play. I think we can be a lot better. Some of the attention to detail can be a lot better on our part.”
It has become a cliché of sorts, that every team and player in every sport “just tries to get better every day.” But take a big picture look at the Kings, who this spring have posted numbers that are becoming historic in the modern era of four-series playoff hockey.
They could be better than 10-0 on the road? Really? We wonder how?
Better than a 14-2 record, which still leaves L.A. in contention to tie the 1988 Oilers? Edmonton, with Wayne Gretzky, Jari Kurri, Mark Messier, Glenn Anderson et al, went 16-2 and were voted in a Sporting News poll years later as one of the Top 5 professional teams of the last 120 years.
At times this season, the Kings didn’t even look like one of the Top 5 professional teams in the Pacific Division. Then again, Drew Doughty — who is back to looking like a young Paul Coffey — never gave us any inkling that his game would be at this level in May either.
After a hold out that cost him the preseason and training camp last fall, Doughty posted his worst numbers (10-26-36, minus-2) in three seasons. Now, he is a metaphor for what has occurred with the Kings. A rebuild that looked to have stalled for a long while could now bear the ultimate fruit.
“Everyone was all over Drew, saying he wasn’t playing well,” said captain Dustin Brown. “He didn’t have the numbers he wanted, the numbers you (media) guys expected of him. Now, you’re starting to see how well he can play on the offensive side of things.”
Today Doughty’s game has made an about-face. He has become that elite puck-transporting defenceman that — from Scott Niedermayer, to Sergei Zubov, to Larry Murphy, to Paul Coffey, to Duncan Keith — almost every championship team seems to have had some version of.
“I know,” Doughty began, “that in order for our team to be successful, I’ve got to be the best defenseman on the ice every night. (But) even though I kind of put that pressure on myself, I’m having fun.”
Doughty is just another thing that is going right for these Kings, a team that has that air of the 1993 Montreal Canadiens about it this spring.
You will recall a Habs club that went 10-1 in overtime games during its playoff run in ’93, prevailing over Los Angeles in the Kings only other trip to the finals. Montreal won Games 2, 3 and 4 of that Stanley Cup in OT, closing out the Kings in five, and finishing a Stanley Cup that now seems preordained, when you consider that 10 of 16 playoff wins came in extra time.
However, if the Devils are feeling like the Washington Generals to this travelling road show that is L.A., they’re not showing it.
“We’re in the Stanley Cup final,” said veteran goalie Martin Brodeur. “One way or another, it’s going to be over soon. We might as well go hard.”
Brodeur harkened back to the 1995 Finals, in which the Devils were on the other end, up 2-0 after a pair of games against Detroit.
“We beat Detroit in four,” Brodeur said. “We didn’t want to give them one sniff of life. That’s why we swept them. We were so scared of them.
“They (the Kings) don’t want to give us any life.”
He’s right. They won’t.