With The Lakers Finished, The Angles Struggling And Dodgers Having a Frank McCourt Hangover, It’s Time to Root for the Hockey Team
The Kings are giving LA sports fans something to root for after the Lakers lost.
The Lakes are done, Albert Pujols isn’t hitting for the Angels, the Dodgers are winning but against bad competition and there’s still a “fear factor” associated with Frank McCourt and while expectations are high at USC, the football season doesn’t start for nearly four months.
So what else to Los Angeles sports fans have to cheer for these days?
Oh, yeah, there’s the Kings!
The most forgotten sports team in L.A., is the now the only one playing for a championship. It’s hardly the sport of kings in this town but hey, it’s all they’ve got right now. So look for sports bars to fill up, Twitter posts to explode and people to be talking about a team many had never previously watched and about players they don’t know and names they don’t recognize.
Anyone heard of Dustin Penner? (He scored the winning goal in overtime that launched the Kings into the Stanley Cup Finals.) Who’s the goalie? (Jonathan Quick.) Where’s Wayne Gretzky? (Long gone.)
Most LA fans have only passing knowledge in the sport. They pay more attention to beach volleyball than they do hockey. What’s offsides? High sticking? Icing?
But despite all these shortcomings, they will become Kings fans for duration of the Stanley Cup Finals. And there are a few die-hard fans on which to build a base and learn the names of the players and the rules of the game. Nearly 4,000 of them turned up Tuesday night to greet the team plane returning from Phoenix after clinching the Stanley Cup berth.
That’s a start. Plus, it’s getting to be June Gloom at the beach, so the Kings will be kings of Los Angeles for a couple of weeks.