Here is a video of the Official Team of L.A. Live the Only Team Still Currently Playing at L.A. Live, the Los Angeles Kings, beating the Phoenix Coyotes to advance to the Stanley Cup Finals for the first time since 1993.
With Thursday night's 2-1 win over the Phoenix Coyotes, the L.A. Kings, hockey's most emphatic playoff team, sit just one win away from a trip to the Stanley Cup Finals. Barring a catastrophic meltdown, it would be the team's first appearance in the Finals since 1993, a year when Wayne Gretzky was on the ice, Barry Melrose was behind the bench, and Nancy Reagan, John Candy, and Goldie Hawn were in the stands.
The Kings lost the Cup in five games to the Montreal Canadiens, an outcome that scans as definitive yet had seemed quite unimaginable in the third period of Game 2. Up 2-1 late in the third, the Kings were less than two minutes away from returning to Los Angeles with a 2-0 series lead. The whistle was blown, and the Kings' Marty McSorley was called over.
As I watched the Rangers pull away from the Devils on Monday, I realized that in a few days, we might be in for a New York–Los Angeles championship series. The Kings, who face the Coyotes in Game 2 of the Western Conference finals tonight, are an 8-seed, but they have a 1-0 lead on Phoenix in the series and are 9-1 in the NHL playoffs. Right now, it seems there's a solid chance that America's two most populous cities will square off for the Stanley Cup.
The possibility got me thinking about previous New York–L.A. clashes. It turns out that in 336 combined years of American championships (big four sports only), the two biggest cities in the country have met just seven times. That was it. New York is 4-3. Hooray!
That limited history set my mind to wandering, and after an hour spent looking at lists of NHL, NBA, MLB, and NFL champions, along with some furious notepad scribbling, I discovered the greatest sports trivia question of all time. It has to do with cities and championships, but after the time put into the research and the ensuing thrill of discovery, I'm going to be totally heartless and make you read a bit more.
First, a fantastic trivia question that will live forever in the shadow of the one that comes later:
The New Jersey Devils are one of the unforeseen success stories in the East this postseason, and no player is more surprising than Marek Zidlicky.
In addition to being the year of the upset, the year of the hot goaltender, and the year of complaining incessantly about suspension decisions, the 2012 NHL playoffs are quickly becoming the year of the “puck over the glass” penalty. The call has come up so often in this year’s playoffs that Canadian sports network TSN has started keeping track of it on a big board. They’ve already counted more than 20.
I have my own big board, and it keeps track of how many times the penalty should have been called: zero. That’s because the puck-over-glass rule is the single dumbest rule in hockey, and maybe in all of sports.
Dale Hunter has radically altered the Washington Capitals.
He’s slashed the ice time of the club’s franchise forward, Alexander Ovechkin. He’s taken a team that used to be the exemplar of run-and-gun hockey in the modern NHL and converted it into a buttoned-down, defense-first bunch.
Is it brilliance, or is it madness?
Shortly before Alexei Ponikarovsky followed up on his own shot to give the New Jersey Devils a 4-3 win over the Philadelphia Flyers in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference semifinals, New Jersey's Ilya Kovalchuk had collected his own rebound too.
Welcome to the second episode of the Triangle Podcast. This week, with the NBA playoffs in full swing, I thought I'd catch up with some of my Shootaround partners and talk basketball. Robert Mays stopped by the studio to discuss Zach Randolph's dominance over Blake Griffin in the Clippers-Grizzlies series, the Bulls and life after Derrick Rose, plus what we expected from Game 3 of the Knicks-Heat series.
Rembert Browne called in to lament Paul Pierce Tebowing on … the city of Atlanta, and the caliber of celebrity sitting courtside at Hawks games. I also talked to Katie Baker about the Stanley Cup playoffs (specifically Wednesday night's heart-stopping triple-overtime Rangers-Caps game) and Jonah Keri about Bryce Harper, the Rangers, the Rays, and an exciting few nights in Major League Baseball.
The first round of the NHL playoffs is quite possibly the two best weeks in all of sports. Yes, the Stanley Cup finals are nice, in that endlessly drawn-out “Why are they taking a week off before it starts?” way that the NHL insists upon. But the first round is pure adrenaline. It’s the very best the sport has to offer, every night, served up through a fire hose for two straight weeks.
And this year’s version might have been the most exciting in recent memory. It seemed like every game involved either overtime or a brawl or double-digit goals or some combination of all three. For fans of the 16 teams that made up the first round, the last two weeks have been amazing.
For the fans of those 16 teams. For the rest of us … not so much.
The Los Angeles Kings are an 8-seed in this year’s NHL playoffs.
And they are better than you think.
The Kings, who dispatched the defending Western Conference Champions in the first round of the playoffs, are one of those teams whose true level of ability transcends their modest regular-season showing. In fact, at this point, I’d argue that the Kings are one of the strongest clubs chasing the Cup.
It's the inaugural episode of The Triangle Podcast. Each episode, I'll talk to a few different Triangle writers about the sports they cover. This week, I talked to Bill Barnwell about the falling NFL draft stock Vontaze Burfict, the Dolphins pinning their hopes on Ryan Tannehill, and whether a system should come before personnel when it comes to drafting players. I also checked in with Katie Baker on the crazy, bloody, and dramatic Stanley Cup playoffs, then Roger Bennett, one half of the Men in Blazers, joined me to recap two insane days of Champions League semifinals and the upcoming Manchester derby. Finally, I talked to Jonah Keri about Carl Crawford's trip to Dr. James Andrews and Oakland's five-tool star in the making, Yoenis Cespedes.
Today, April 26, is the anniversary of what was nearly the most singular confluence of luck and skill in MLB history.
On this date in 2005, the Yankees faced Bartolo Colon and the Angels at what is now the "old" Yankee Stadium. In the first inning, Alex Rodriguez came up with Derek Jeter and Hideki Matsui on base. He blasted a three-run home run to left center. In the third, he came up again with Gary Sheffield on base. This time, his home run was a two-run shot. It only took one inning before he found himself facing Colon again with the bases loaded. The grand slam that followed gave A-Rod three home runs in three at-bats and chased Colon from the game. He hit a single in the sixth, and came up for one last chance in the bottom of the eighth. The bases were empty. Jake Woods threw his 0-1 pitch, and A-Rod lined a ball deep into center field. There's no video of the moment, because nobody quite knew the history at stake, but we know it went deep, and we know Jeff DaVanon was close to the wall when he made the catch.
And though nobody knew it at the time, that warning track shot was the closest anyone has come in major league history to hitting for the home run cycle — a solo, two-run, three-run, and grand slam home run in the same game.
Recording a new album can quickly become an exercise in doing a lot of waiting around. But for Wes Miles and Mat Santos, the lead singer and bassist, respectively, for the band Ra Ra Riot, their downtime over the last couple of weeks has been largely consumed by one thing: playoff hockey. Both Miles, who grew up a Devils fan in New Jersey, and Santos, who roots for the Bruins, are big hockey fans — and they've got the tattoos, Starter jackets, and national anthem performances to prove it. Grantland's Katie Baker spoke to the pair over the weekend, as their favored hockey teams (and Baker's) faced first-round elimination.
So you're down in Mississippi recording a new album, and you're also big hockey fans whose teams are currently in the playoffs. What are your days like?
Mat: Well, usually we've been doing six-day weeks, and we're usually here at the studio for about 12 hours a day. It sounds like a lot but it's relaxed because usually only one of us is doing something at a given time. Right now, in this phase in our recording, because we've been here for about four weeks, Rebecca [Zeller] is doing violin overdubs. So the rest of us just get to sort of hang out. You might hear a basketball being bounced around. And we bring our hockey net. So we play street hockey in the parking lot, watch hockey … we mostly do hockey-related things when we're not recording.
1. Claude Giroux: All Claude Everything
I am obligated by William Penn blood oath to award any Philly athlete the top spot in Rankonia, but Sarah Larimer really makes a compelling case for the Flyers forward: "Katie Baker is right. It is pretty much impossible to dislike Claude Giroux. Apologies to that Monet bro, but Giroux is now my favorite dude named Claude. Let's all start a Claude Giroux Fan Club. We can get T-shirts that say 'Are you taking this faceoff here?'
"On Sunday, Claude Giroux told Flyers coach Peter Laviolette that he wanted to start against the Penguins in Game 6. Then, this happened:
"Also, this:
"'Before they even dropped the puck, he came over and he told me watch the first shift,' Danny Briere said after the Flyers' 5-1 win. 'When he did, I didn't know what to say to him. He's been our leader all year and once again he took another step in that direction today. It was simply amazing, plain and simple. He was possessed.'
"Check out THAT on NHL.com, Steve Ott!"
So did you hear the one about the NHL playoff series that went according to script?
No, you didn’t, because this year, that isn't happening. The favorites are struggling, the underdogs are winning, the dynasties are imploding, and a bunch of guys you’ve never heard of are dominating. As a wise man once said, everything is happening. And nothing makes sense.
Let’s summarize.
