June 11 , 2007

Kings' faithful jailed by failure

Bob Keisser

Today's purple, gold, silver and black humor edition of The Sporting Muse:

There are worse things to be at the moment than a Los Angeles Kings fan.

Like, being stuck in the Quantanamo Hilton. Or, walking the Green Cupcake Mile with Paris Hilton in the Lynwood hoosegow. Or, being named President Bush's War Czar.

But it's a very close race.

The Los Angeles Kings will celebrate their 40th year of existence next season, and chances are they won't be serving Duck at any of the banquets. The Anaheim Ducks won the Stanley Cup Wednesday in their 14th season, and it was their second trip to the finals. And the Ducks would not exist today if former Kings owner Bruce McNall hadn't gone broke and needed the territorial fee paid by Disney to launch the team.

McNall has been to jail and back, but Kings fans are still in solitary confinement.

Despite what everyone has to say about the NHL (no one cares, no one watches and no one in charge has a clue), there are living, breathing hockey fans, and despite the sport having become a smaller niche than soccer (yikes), they are as rabid as they come.

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to be more devout than any organized church flock. Whether they hang around for a 40th now that the other team in the area has skated and drank from the silver chalice is best left unanswered.
It's not like the franchise hasn't had its chances.

The Los Angeles Kings were born in 1967 and had a 1-in-6 chance in their early days to reach the Stanley Cup finals, when the league created a whole new division and gave it equal access to the finals. Didn't happen.

They have had over the years one of the game's best goalies (Rogie Vachon), coaches (Bob Pulford), scorers (Marcel Dionne, Luc Robitaille) and lines (Triple Crown), and still couldn't get any traction.

The Kings won three playoff series in their first 13 years, and both teams they beat folded (California Seals) or moved (Atlanta Flames). The year they did win a notable playoff series, it was called the Miracle on Manchester. Nice moment. The Kings lost the next playoff series.

They even traded for the best player in hockey, made it to the 1993 finals in the hallowed halls of the Montreal Forum, and then lost because of Marty McSorley's bent stick. Gretzky then thumbed his nose at the organization because McNall was going bust, and then was traded himself. Real nice moment.

The Kings haven't been to the playoffs since 2002, or before the U.S. invaded Iraq, and just four times since the 1993 finals appearance and when the Ducks were born. As the paraphrased saying goes, if it skates like the Kings and loses like the Kings, it must be the Kings.

What can clearly be said is that the Kings have had the most ineffectual leadership in L.A. sports history, which is saying something with the Clippers' Donald T. Sterling being in town and the Raiders having once been a resident.

Jack Kent Cooke was a curmudgeon who meddled. McNall was a con man who left the team bankrupt. The guys who bought the team from him (Cohen and Sudikoff) were under-financed and sold on the cheap to Phil Anschutz, who is such a recluse and out-of-town owner that his bio in the media guide does not include a picture and is three sentences long.

The puck stops there.

NBC averaged a 1.6 Nielsen rating for its three Stanley Cup telecasts of the Ducks win. Game 5 actually had a lower rating than Game 4, and Game 3 was NBC's lowest-rated prime time show ever (1.1).

Here's something that should scare the NHL to death: Major newspapers in several cities did not staff the finals. The New York Times covered just Game 1. Gary Bettman, your 15 minutes of incompetence are over.

Game 1 of the NBA Finals drew a 6.3 Nielsen, off 19 percent from last year and the lowest Game 1 in four years. I guess not everyone enjoys watching Bruce Bowen guard LeBron James.

Deepest apologies to Wilson High baseball enthusiasts for not mentioning Bob Bailey in Wednesday's column. It wasn't to be a recapitulation of all Bruin greats, but he deserved mention as much as anyone.

Speaking of apologies, here's one the Pac-10, maligned here as being subpar this season. Well, even though just four teams went to the NCAA Regionals, three advanced to the Super Regionals.

In general, the West has stood up well this far, with five teams still alive (Arizona State, UCLA, Oregon State, Fullerton and UC Irvine) not including Rice, which is in the WAC.

Mississippi State, North Carolina, Louisville and Rice won the first game of their best-of-3 Super Regionals Friday, and I'd be surprised if any of those four were to lose two and miss Omaha.

The other four, all with West Coast teams, start today. I'll take UC Irvine over Wichita State, UCLA over Fullerton, Oregon State over Michigan and Arizona State over Mississippi.

That would make for a cozy bracket in Omaha. It's just a shame that the West gets bunched so there's no chance of a West-versus-West title showdown. It says here that the finals will be Rice versus Arizona State for the title.

By the way, the Dirtbags played 21 games this season against teams still playing baseball. The only lament from their losing the regional to UCLA is knowing how insane Blair Field would be this weekend if they had won, and it would have been the Dirtbags versus Fullerton for a trip to Omaha.