Thrill-a-minute Game 2 showdown NHL at its best
LOS ANGELES— Bottle this, Mr. Bettman.
Then distribute it to the other 28 NHL clubs and the players union with the message, “Play this way and our game will be so popular we’ll be counting gate receipts every night in 100,000-seat football stadiums and the minimum salary will be $4 million.”
The Kings and Rangers, representing Hollywood and Broadway, respectively, have delivered unpredictable, rollicking entertainment for the opening two games of the 2014 Stanley Cup final.
That is, unless you find lead changes, goals, egregious mistakes, enormous saves, overtime thrills and punishing bodywork make for dull hockey.
Oh yeah, and the fastest two goals scored in a Cup final game in 67 years on Saturday night. That, too.
Yessir, these two clubs certainly appear determined to ensure this season, already proclaimed by the somewhat hyperbolic commish as the “best ever” in NHL history, ends with a bang.
So much fun, folks, you’d swear the coaching staffs on both teams were banned from the building or lost in Saturday’s dense L.A. smog, leaving the players to just figure it out for themselves.
You know, freelancing and ad lib stuff. Things the imaginative Mats Zuccarello does every night anyway.
Two overtime dandies are in the books, including Saturday night’s 5-4 double OT victory by the Kings on captain Dustin Brown’s winner that gave them a 2-0 lead in the series.
And therein lies our problem. This all may be over very, very quickly.
Not as quickly as California Chrome’s bid for history, but almost. More like the threat of a CFL players’ strike.
The Rangers have built 2-0 leads in both games and blown them twice, leaving you to wonder how they can possibly recover as the series switches to Manhattan.
They did fight back from a 3-1 series deficit against Pittsburgh, yes. But they’re leaking goals all of a sudden, their highest-paid players are delivering nothing and L.A. just continues to behave like a team that prefers to come from behind.
A pivotal goalie interference call in the third period — a poor non-call, actually — keyed the Kings to obliterate a 4-2 Ranger lead, and Brown’s goal at 10:26 of the second OT was an even bigger emotional dagger than that potted in OT by Justin Williams in Game 1.
So sure, this could be the first Cup final sweep in a long, long time.
Led by Ryan McDonagh, the Rangers started so very well. He drilled Jeff Carter with a vicious, Denis Potvin-like hipcheck early that buckled Carter’s left knee and briefly sent the high-scoring centre to the infirmary. He fenced with Tyler Toffoli and got in the L.A. forward’s face.
He scored a goal, then took a penalty for dropping Dustin Brown to the ice with a crosscheck after Brown had delivered a sneaky crosscheck to McDonagh’s lower back behind the play.
Finally, McDonagh assisted on Zuccarello’s goal late in the first, rounding out a strong opening 20 minutes for the New York defenceman and his team.
On his goal at 10:48 of the first, teammate Dominic Moore started the sequence by intercepting a Justin Williams pass deep in the L.A. zone. From the left point, McDonagh fired a rising slapshot that might have glanced off a Kings defender before soaring over a crouching Jonathan Quick.
With 90 seconds left in the first, Matt Greene fumbled the puck at the Ranger line, noteworthy in that Greene had been expected to be scratched for Robyn Regehr.
Zuccarello sped off with the puck. The Kings blocked two shot attempts, but then McDonagh hammered another shot that appeared to be going just wide of the right post. Instead, it hit Zuccarello in the pants and dropped to his feet, and he bunted it into the open net with Quick hopelessly out of position.
The second period was wild with four goals, and the third even wilder with two more as the Kings — again — stormed back from a two-goal deficit for the third straight game.
The centrepiece of the crazy sec- ond was probably the 11-second sequence between Willie Mitchell’s first goal of the playoffs and his awful turnover behind the L.A. net that led to Derick Brassard’s goal to make it 4-2 for the visitors. In the third, a non-call for goalie interference on Dwight King and King’s subsequent deflection past Henrik Lundqvist started the L.A. comeback, and Marian Gaborik potted his 13th to tie the game 4-4 and, ultimately, make it three years in a row when the first two games of the Cup final have gone to OT. King should have been sent to the penalty box for squashing The King, and you can bet that call will make goalie interference penalties, and a possible coach’s challenge, an even hotter topic when the NHL competition committee meets on Monday in the Big Apple. As it stands, however, that committee needs to pretty much leave things alone if this is the product it is creating. Then again, maybe it’s just the Kings. They’ve made this a spring of one messy triumph after another. They like this. In fact, two more games of it will suit them just fine.