Not Tonight

Overheard on the elevator on the way to the dressing rooms after the Kings beat the Edmonton Oilers 5-1 Thursday night at Staples Center: “I knew they were sleepy on the second shift.” This from a hockey insid...

Do My Simple Job

Everyone in the southern part of the state knew he was going to do it. Sunday night, and then again Monday. Who? What? Ovechkin, whose one-timer from the left dot on the power play simply can’t be stopped. S...

One Showed Up

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who noticed how poorly the Edmonton Oilers played in LA Saturday night on the way to a 4-0 loss. When their coach, Ken Hitchcock, was asked about his team after the game, he sa...

CopyCat Friday Night

The Kings came out to play Friday night. They almost never play on Fridays. They’ll be back at it on Sunday evening. That’s unusual, too. What wasn’t out of character was their performance. They could get two g...

Kings Black(Hawk) Out

The LA Kings flat blew it on Saturday afternoon with Chicago in town. Not only did they lose to a statistically weaker opponent, they did in in dramatic fashion. After period two, in which Los Angeles poured...

West Coast Intrigue

The Kings and Ducks are in playoff races, with the latter being much more assured that all will end well than the former. Sunday night, they played each other. Several stories competed for attention while the t...

My 500th NHL Game Very Good

The Ducks should have been the rested, and thus faster, team Sunday night with LA in town. Empirically, they’re the faster team anyway, but man, they didn’t look it aginst the Kings. The LA team, by the way, ha...

Angry All Summer

It wasn’t just a slow start. It was practically no start at all that the LA Kings got off to on Friday night with their season on the line. The reasons? The non-conspiracy types might have said that it was the ...

Just a Little Inconsistent

The Kings were better than the Ducks in period one of their game Monday night at Staples Center. They outshot the Anaheim team 9-5 in the first, a reflection of the fact that they had the puck most of the time....

Kings Sign Kopitar, Collapse

The big news in LA, the news that trumps all other news: we finally have a football team. Wait. This is Inside Hockey, so you probably don’t care about that. Me neither. No, it was this: number 11 is now and...