Kings put up admirable cup defence
LOS ANGELES — Of all the possible outcomes of the Western Conference final, the one no one saw coming was Jonathan Quick being outplayed by the other goaltender.
But it’s probably just as well that the 2012 Conn Smythe winner proved all too human in the game that eliminated the Los Angeles Kings from the Stanley Cup race — Saturday night’s 4-3 double-overtime loss to the Chicago Blackhawks.
There wasn’t much left of the Kings by the time Patrick Kane finished off his Game 5 hat trick, teeing up a sweet two-on-one pass from Jonathan Toews and firing it beyond Quick’s reach into the top of the net.
It ended the longest game in Kings history, and — given their state of health — about the longest playoff run the defending champs could have logically expected.
Of course, logic has nothing to do with it, which is how L.A. got it to overtime in the first place Saturday — Mike Richards’s pants scoring with 9.4 seconds left in regulation to finish off a play that may or may not have been exactly as drawn up by assistant coach Davis Payne at the end of an improbable series of events, but definitely ended up with the puck in the net behind Corey Crawford.
Think of it: Chicago playoff miracle man Bryan Bickell chips the puck off the boards with what looks like perfect draw weight to avoid icing with 18 seconds left, but the puck starts rolling instead of sliding on the sticky ice and gets all the way past the red line, missing a stray helmet by inches en route.
Darryl Sutter calls time out. Payne draws up the play at the bench. Melville’s Jarret Stoll wins the faceoff, losing his helmet in the process, the puck comes back to the point to Slava Voynov, then down the boards to Anze Kopitar while Richards — reactivated for Game 5 after missing three games with a concussion — magically appears behind both Chicago defencemen (the Hawks’ best, Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook, mind you) and gets his thigh pad on Kopitar’s shot, deflecting it past Crawford.
At that moment, and several more in the first overtime period, it looked as though the Kings might actually be able to cheat death and live to see Game 6 Monday night in L.A. But by the second extra session, their moxie was gone, and the faster, deeper Blackhawks were taking over.
The scene after Kane’s goal in the Madhouse on Madison was, well, madness. And all hail Joel Quenneville’s well coached, well constructed Hawks, whose job only gets tougher now against the very hot, and very on-their-game Boston Bruins, in the first Original Six matchup in the Stanley Cup final in 34 years.
But before bidding them adieu, a few words of praise for the Kings — unloved though their game may be in other precincts — who made an honourable defence of their championship. They survived a compressed 48-game schedule without one-third of their 2012 playoff blue-line, won a war of attrition versus St. Louis in the first round and had just enough left to go seven hard games against San Jose before hitting the wall.
And by going three rounds, despite a 1-8 road record, they beat the Stanley Cup hangover. Of the nine cup winners prior to the Kings, only one — the 2008 Detroit Red Wings, who went to the 2009 final and lost — made it past the second round the following season. Seven of them either lost in the first round or missed the playoffs.
Stoll’s concussion that cost six games against San Jose, Richards’s concussion for three games of the conference final, Drew Doughty’s cracked ankle, Dustin Brown’s knee, Kopitar’s knee, Justin Williams’s slight shoulder separation — these details came out in the moments after the Kings’ elimination, and it merely underlined how lucky they were last year — how lucky most Stanley Cup champs are — to have so few energysapping injuries.
“Three, four guys that were game-time (decisions) after Game 6 in San Jose, literally,” Sutter said. “I think most teams are going to say that the farther you go. Also tells you how tough it is to win, how you need that. You have to stay healthy, have to be close to 100 per cent, especially with your top guys. I know we weren’t.”
But they were luckier still, in their cup year, to have Quick in all-world form. Cup champs never get there without great goaltending, but in 2012, Jonathan Quick was so sensational, the crazy saves began to look routine.
This spring he was just very good, for the most part. And on a few notable occasions — such as Duncan Keith’s unobstructed shot from the blue-line that sifted through his five hole and gave the Hawks the early lead Saturday — not very good at all.
His teammates bailed him out, though.
“I think we went farther than …” Sutter said, almost finishing the sentence with what many of us believed: farther than they could have expected.
“Obviously we’re disappointed to lose to Chicago, but we’re certainly not disappointed in how we played. I mean, I think you look at our season, other than not getting home ice, we’ve done everything we’ve wanted.”
“Once you win a Stanley Cup, it means a lot more getting knocked out. You don’t really know what you play for until you do it. And tonight … sucks,” said Brown, who contributed next to nothing this spring on a bad hinge.
“We wanted to keep playing. We wanted to play until the end of June. We just didn’t have it against these guys,” Stoll said.
“They’re a great team. We wish them all the best. They’ve got a lot of great players and they play their system and they’re well coached. We just couldn’t find a way to win a road game.”
“You play hockey in June to win,” said Williams, who scored or set up so many of the Kings’ biggest goals. “You get this far, to not have a chance to defend it … sometimes you have to lose again to remember how hard it was to win. We’ll keep this bad feeling until we get another go at it.
“I can’t stand looking at somebody else raise that cup, and now we’re going to have to do it.”