Kings care about wins, not how they get the wins
Defending Cup champions unapologetic about way they play
CHICAGO — The size versus speed thesis — Los Angeles brawn versus Chicago flash in the Western Conference final that starts Saturday — was shot down in about 15 seconds.
“Everybody’s fast and everybody’s big,” said Darryl Sutter, the Kings coach, whose press conferences are commonly known as the place where story ideas go to die.
“I think their size, if you look at it, the lineup they had last game, our lineup we had last game, is identical. So the size is the same, so I guess we have a problem with their speed.” How do you address that? “Use our size.” Next theory up the flagpole: the aesthetically pleasing Blackhawks, critically acclaimed for the attractiveness of their series win over Detroit, versus the dour, shutdown defending champions, who scored 12 goals in six games against St. Louis in the first round, and 14 in seven against San Jose. It made for easy arithmetic.
“I don’t understand the question,” said Sutter.
“Let me answer that,” said Kings GM Dean Lombardi.
“The (first-round) St. Louis series … by far generated as much if not more buzz in Los Angeles than the (2012) Stanley Cup final. You had guys on ESPN radio, who have never been to a hockey game, going to those games ... and in my seven years in L.A. I have never heard so many people outside the circle start talking about how impressed they were with those players and how hard this game is.
“In terms of attractive hockey, I’ve never seen so many people turned on by the game itself.” Really? This can’t be. Why, every day you read strong opinions expressed about the death of hockey, the unwatchable 2-1 games, the ritual shot-blocking, netcrashing, chip-it-in, chip-itout game that will soon result in 30 overcoached teams clogging everything up and abandoning offence altogether.
And yet, Lombardi and Sutter have an unlikely ally in their opinion: Joel Quenneville, whose Blackhawks are supposedly the antithesis of everything the game-killers believe in.
“I watched that first-round series with St. Louis, and out of all of the series, that probably was the most exciting to watch, the most competitive,” Quenneville said Friday, when the teams held practices an hour’s drive from one another, neither at the United Center, where the Rolling Stones were playing their second of three Chicago concerts, with Games 1 and 2 squeezed in between them, back-to-back Saturday and Sunday.
“So, you might not think that’s pretty hockey,” Quenneville said, “but it’s intense, and I didn’t mind watching it. We expect a hard series, and a fast series, and I’m not really measuring the entertainment value, but I expect it will be entertaining.”
The fact is, every good team plays defence, blocks shots, finishes checks, and clogs up the middle of the defensive zone. The difference between good and great teams is in the number of special players who have the ability to leap in and fully exploit those moments when the seas part for just an instant, when one player gets fractionally out of position, when a lane opens or a check is lost.
Kings captain Dustin Brown answered the stylistic-clash question this way:
“We can bore you all to death (as long as) we keep on winning,” he said.
“I could care less what people think about our game, or talk about ‘growing the game.’ We’ve found something that’s successful for us as a group, and sometimes people don’t think it’s exciting, it depends on your opinion.
“Some people thought our series with St. Louis was really boring because we only scored X amount of goals. But I think there’s things that make playoff hockey exciting and it’s not always about goal scoring.
“You look back last year to the Philly-Pitt series and everybody thought that was the greatest series ever, (but) from a player’s standpoint, I don’t know when you give up 10 or eight goals in a game that that’s very good hockey. But we found what makes us successful, and we’re going to continue to do that.”
The Hawks would argue that their series with Detroit was physical and intense and chippy, too, but they’d probably concede they are preparing to be hit harder by the Kings.
“I think we want to make sure we’re disciplined,” Quenneville said, “and we want to make sure that whether we’re hitting or counter-hitting that we’re not going to be deterred in going where we have to go to be successful.
“We expect a hard forecheck, and a hard game against us.”
Will it be as pretty as Chicago-Detroit? It’s in the eye of the beholder.
Over the years, from the time the pugnacious Flyers were winning with brawn, to the suffocating defence played by Stanley Cup finalists in Florida and Dallas and New Jersey, fears that the game was going to hell in a handbasket have been floated and gone away and come back again.
So to those who see a far bigger difference between the Hawks and Kings’ games than probably exists, this Western Conference final marks another crisis point. Good versus evil.
“Big teams versus little teams, skilled teams versus grinding teams, sometimes skill wins out, sometimes the bigger teams win out. Nothing is really written in stone,” Detroit GM Ken Holland said, before Game 7 against Chicago. “When a team wins a championship, we all think it’s going a certain way, and then a couple of years later, it seems like some other style is winning.
“To me, one of the beauties of the Stanley Cup playoffs is the matchup of different styles. Even going back to late ’90s, early 2000s, the Dallas Stars had a little different makeup than the Detroit Red Wings and the Colorado Avalanche. Back then, the Red Wings wanted to get the puck off the boards into the middle of the ice, and the Stars were unbelievable in the trenches.”
For what it’s worth, the oddsmaker Bodog has the Pittsburgh Penguins as favourites to win the Stanley Cup, with Chicago second, followed by L.A. and the Boston Bruins.
If the Penguins or Blackhawks win, would that mean the game is alive and well?
If the Kings or Bruins were to win, would that mean the game is doomed? Answers: no, and no. Any eventuality would only guarantee another argument a year from now. In the meantime, vive la difference.