LOS ANGELES – For 45 years, the Los Angeles Kings were anything but royal. Though they had the Miracle on Manchester and the Wayne Gretzky era, though they had appeared in the Stanley Cup Final in 1993 and made hockey cool in Hollywood for a while, they won virtually nothing. They won only one conference and one division title.
The Kings ended 45 years of frustration with their first Stanley Cup title. (Reuters)Then came Monday night, and finally, somehow, the throne.
Crown the Kings.
With a 6-1 victory over the New Jersey Devils, the Kings won the series, 4-2, and hoisted their first Stanley Cup. They won their first 10 road games – setting the playoff record for a road winning streak, tying the playoff record for total road victories – and went a stunning 16-4 overall.
And they did it as an eighth seed, by far the lowest to win the Cup. Since the NHL started seeding its conferences one through eight in 1993-94, only one bottom-four seed had ever won it all – the 1995 Devils, a fifth seed in a lockout-shortened season.
These Kings were commoners for much of 2011-12, underachieving in a league of salary-capped equality. General manager Dean Lombardi fired coach Terry Murray and brought in Darryl Sutter in December. He acquired sniper Jeff Carter before the trade deadline in February. Despite a talented roster that had been expected to contend, the Kings ranked second-to-last in the league in scoring. They grabbed the final playoff spot in the West.
But suddenly, it all came together in the playoffs. Jonathan Quick continued be the best goaltender in the game and the defense stayed tight as the Kings started scoring more. They knocked off the first, second and third seeds in the West before exorcising the Devils.
The Kings' other homegrown stars broke out – Drew Doughty, Anze Kopitar, Dustin Brown. The dynamic duo dumped by the Philadelphia Flyers last summer – Carter and Mike Richards – rebounded better than anyone could have imagined. The depth players contributed, from rookie Dwight King to biggie winger Dustin Penner to … well, almost everyone chipped in at least one goal.
Making this run in this era was a miracle, no matter how well the Kings should have played all along or where they were seeded in the end. It was a bigger miracle than the Miracle on Manchester, when the Kings turned a 5-0 deficit into a 6-5 overtime victory over Gretzky's 1982 Edmonton Oilers at the Forum on Manchester Blvd. That was just Game 3 of a best-of-5 first-round upset. This run was certainly a bigger triumph than making the '93 final; Gretzky's Kings couldn't complete their quest.
http://sports.yahoo.com/news/nhl--kings-take-the-nhl-s-throne-with-first-ever-stanley-cup-championship.html
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