Farewell LA Kings Season

And that’s all she wrote, Kings fans. Vegas has officially eliminated them in round 1. And trust me, everything about it was just as depressing as you’d think. In fact, it was probably worse than you’d thought.

In the Kings best period of the series, they were still unable to solve the problem that is 3 time Stanley Cup winner Marc Andre Fleury. An onslaught to start, the Kings were its hooting Vegas 5-1 after 5 minutes, 10-3 10 minutes in and 14-8 by the time the period was over. No, they didn’t slow down but they were hindered by Kempe’s 2 minutes in the penalty box for no reason. Add to that the Knights blocked 8 shots to the Kings 2 – it appeared by all standards the Kings dominated the period. 62.5% in the faceoff circle, clean zone entries, only one egregious penalty called against them, a stellar penalty kill in which the Knights only got off one shot, hits 18-11… But not where it counted. None of the Kings shots were particularly challenging and despite some exemplary skating from the likes of Alex Iafallo, Drew Doughty, Anze Kopitar – the usuals basically – and some grade A goaltending from Jonathan Quick, the Kings weren’t making a dent on the scoreboard.

Unfortunately for the Kings playoff hopes, Vegas did. 4:04 into the second period. The Kings just didn’t have that jump they had in the first, and in a play telegraphed so obviously a friend leaned over to me as it was happening and said ‘they’re going to score’ literally a second before they did. Quick looks right, blocker side, puck passes left and Brayden McNabb scores left into the relatively empty net. Yes that McNabb, the one the Kings left unprotected in the expansion draft. The irony is a bitch. If that didn’t suck the life out of the players, it sure did out of the crowd. I mean the potential go-ahead goal for the player we didn’t protect? That stings hard. They were sloppy, generating fewer chances and certainly none Fleury was going to be bothered by. They could break out of the neutral zone the way the did in the first, and everything about their demeanor screamed ‘this is not your 2014 Kings.’ Instead, this is the team that’s won 1 playoff game in 4 years and have scored 3 goals in 4 games. Since it wouldn’t be fair not to point out – there were two questionable calls when the Kings had good scoring chances the refs called dead then ‘changed their minds’ on the call. One was icing that obviously wasn’t icing and the second was when Pearson had an empty net to shoot on and they didn’t end up calling the penalty. But even on the one Kings power play of the period they just weren’t up to it. No good zone entries, couldn’t connect on passes, and couldn’t come close to challenging Fleury. As usual, they were doubling the shots on goal but halving the goals.

The third didn’t bring any relief. The only relief came from knowing the least amount of goals ever scored in a playoff series was in the Ducks-Wild Western Conference Final in 2003 where Anaheim held Minnesota to one goal. So at least the Kings 3 goals was more than that? If you can’t laugh you’ll cry. But really feel free to cry because the Kings just didn’t have it this game. Kopitar had a particularly impressive bid, as did Brown as the period closed, but none bested Fleury, even with a power play or pulling Quick for the last minute. (Quick, for the record, had a 1.55 GAA and a .947 save % so he did his job.)  And it had nothing to do with bad refereeing or the NHL fixing anything – the Kings just couldn’t score. “Fleury was really good,” said coach John Stevens, “and they check really well. We created opportunities, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to take advantage of those opportunities, and you want to limit scoring chances, but you need to put the puck in the net to move on this time of the year, and we obviously didn’t do that enough.”