L.A. ready for close-up in spotlight
LOS ANGELES— The Los Angeles Kings organization has travelled a fair distance since the last time the NHL held the all-star game here 15 years ago, with Eric Daze as the featured attraction. Two Stanley Cups and oodles of tickets sold have changed much.
And the distance travelled since the Kings first held the mid-winter “classic” back in 1981? Impossible to measure. Then, that time, was so completely different from where L.A.’s hockey club is today it’s as if to imagine another sports universe, another shinny dimension. Playing in front of mostly family and friends, plus perhaps 9,000 diehard fans, the Kings were in their 14th season playing out of the Fabulous — and we used the term loosely — Forum on Manchester Ave. smack dab in the middle of hardscrabble Inglewood. The rink was intimate and also home to basketball’s Lakers, but the local community was either uninterested in what the NHL and the Kings had to sell, or priced out of the market, and it wasn’t exactly a gleaming destination for folks in Malibu or The Valley.
The Kings had the famed Triple Crown Line of Marcel Dionne, Charlie Simmer and Dave Taylor, the first line in hockey history that season to have each member score 100 points. Los Angeles, however, had never had any playoff success, and back then to play on the U.S. west coast was like playing on a distant planet with only occasional connections to the rest of the hockey world. You heard about things that happened on the hockey front in L.A. more than saw them, and the arrival of the all-star game seemed like an exotic adventure for the NHL. It was the 33rd game, and the league was starting to move the game around, but for the first two decades it had mostly been alternated between Toronto and Montreal.
So L.A. was a big step for the league. But it didn’t change much for the Kings, who continued to struggle to be noticed in their home market.
That changed with Bruce McNall’s purchase of the team in 1987 and Wayne Gretzky’s arrival a year later. The Kings soon became hockey’s travelling circus, at least until McNall’s financial and legal woes ended his run as L.A.’s hockey impresario eight years later. Then, in 1999, the Staples Center was built in the downtown core, previously a no-go zone for tourists, hockey fans and hockey players, and Kings hockey changed for good.
Eighteen years and two Cups later, the Kings seem as comfortable in the downtown core as they ever really were in Inglewood, and now, undeniably, are a permanent part of the Los Angeles sporting fabric.
A Manchester Beach hotel clerk named Tony was crushed to have to skip this Sunday’s all-star game, but there have been 30 feet of snow in Lake Tahoe since Nov. 1 after all, and his snowboard was calling. Tough choice. That said, the Kings win that battle of “all the things there are to do in L.A.” a lot more than they used to. They’ve registered 228 consec- utive sellouts at the Staples Center, including playoffs, and in case you’re thinking cheap tickets are the reason, they’ve increased from an average price of $52 back in the 2011-12 season to $80 today.
Luc Robitaille, who arrived in L.A. as a rookie 30 years ago unable to speak much, if any, English, is now president of business operations for the club. Plus, he has a statue in his image outside the Staples Center, so clearly he’s a fixture.
“We’ve become a real hockey town,” said Robitaille. “We’re not a fad. We’re not going away.”
A lot of Robitaille’s time has been spend trying to develop grassroots hockey in California, and these days the Junior Kings organization, along with the Jr. Ducks down the road and Jr. Sharks up north, are actually developing elite talent and NHL draft picks.
The Ducks have done a great job developing high school hockey in Orange County and the Kings, Robitaille says, hope to follow suit. The idea is to follow Minnesota’s blueprint, ulitimately making high school hockey more popular and the place for aspiring players to sculpt their games before they move on to college hockey.
Being given the job of holding the all-star game in the NHL’s centennial season was both a nice gift for the Kings and a hefty responsibility. They’ll glam it up as much as they can, adding some Hollywood and marquee-worthy content to the weekend’s festivities, because that’s always what is expected of hockey in Los Angeles. Snoop Dogg of Long Beach, you’re on.
Beyond that, however, it’s the second year in which the NHL will use a three-on-three tournament format with a $1-million prize for the winning team for all-star weekend after, at least temporarily, trashing the concept of a full game because, quite frankly, the players had turned it into a travesty by not caring enough.
Three-on-three worked sensationally well in Nashville last year, with a little assistance from John Scott, and now we’ll see how it plays the second time around in a different kind of market. And without Scott, of course.
“What I like about it is that in a five-on-five all-star game, no one wants to get hurt, and plays that way,” said Robitaille. “I remember my first all-star game. The puck was coming through the middle and Larry Robinson, who was playing for the other team, yelled at me, and then grabbed and bearhugged me. I thought, okay, this is what the allstar game is all about. He just didn’t want to hurt me.
“But with three-on-three, you see the skills of players, and you can’t really hit anyway, and then you saw the players last year really start to play because they want to win.”
The future of the format could be impacted by the success of Sunday’s game, but not the future of the Kings or hockey in Los Angeles. Those days are long past. Damien Cox is the co-host of Prime Time Sports on Sportsnet 590 The FAN. He spent nearly 30 years covering a variety of sports for The Star. Follow him @DamoSpin. His column appears Tuesday and Saturday.