The National Hockey League (NHL) is to have the Stanley Cup Finals it dreamed of when the New York Rangers face the Los Angeles Kings in a bone-jarring drama played out in the US’ two biggest media markets.
Not since the New York Yankees took on the Los Angeles Dodgers for the 1981 World Series have Tinsel Town and the Big Apple squared off for a major sporting championship, and for the NHL the showdown between the Kings and Rangers is sure to mean unprecedented exposure.
The best-of-seven series which is scheduled to start today in Los Angeles features two battle-hardened teams in a compelling final rich in Hollywood-type storylines and subplots.
Both Madison Square Garden and the Staples Center will be packed with celebrity A-list hockey fans, like soccer great David Beckham and supermodel Kate Upton, but it is the casual hockey fan that the NHL will be focused on as the league seizes a chance to pull in new followers.
The Rangers, one of the league’s Original Six franchises, can claim some of the NHL’s most loyal supporters, who have waited two decades for another shot at the cup, while the Kings, champions in 2012, return to the finals for the second time in three years.
“The past few years, we’ve tried to earn the respect of the league,” Kings forward Justin Williams said. “LA is not just a place to come and play a hockey game and work on your tan. We want to put LA on the map, and put it significantly on the map with regards to hockey.”
Certainly there can be no disputing the Rangers and Kings both earned their spots in the finals.
After falling behind 3-0 to San Jose in their opening-round series, the Kings had looked poised to make a quick playoff exit, but have fought their way through to the finals by winning three best-of-seven series against the Sharks, the Anaheim Ducks and the Chicago Blackhawks that all went the distance.
In elimination games this postseason the Kings are a perfect 7-0, clinching a berth in the cup finals by finishing off the defending champions Blackhawks 5-4 in a Game Seven overtime thriller.
“You need everybody when you get to Game Seven, you’re not into the individual part of it,” Kings coach Darryl Sutter said after watching his team become the first to win three Game Sevens en route to the finals. “We prefer not to get to Game Seven. Game Seven is about winning the game, doing whatever it takes.”
The Rangers’ path to the finals was no less grueling, with New York needing seven games to see off the Philadelphia Flyers and the Pittsburgh Penguins before defeating the Montreal Canadiens in six games to claim the Eastern conference crown.
To reach a Stanley Cup Finals teams require quality net-minding, and the Kings and Rangers feature two of the very best in Jonathan Quick and Henrik Lundqvist.
Quick is a proven postseason performer, having claimed the Conn Smythe Trophy as the Stanley Cup playoffs’ most valuable player in leading the Kings to their first ever championship two years ago.
At the other end of the rink, the Rangers’ Lundqvist has long been considered one of the tops in the puck-stopping business, taking Vezina Trophy honors as the NHL’s top netminder in 2012 and backstopping Sweden to a gold medal at the 2006 Turin Olympics and a silver at the 2014 Sochi Winter Games.
“When it’s only two-or-three seconds left and you realize you did it, it’s an unbelievable feeling,” Lundqvist said after the Rangers cemented their first appearance in the finals since hoisting the cup in 1994. “But what took us there, is the entire team really stepped up in key moments throughout the year, but especially the playoffs.”
Having traded away their captain Ryan Callahan and with new coach Alain Vigneault, the Rangers have emerged as this season’s team of destiny.
At the trade deadline New York dealt Callahan to the Tampa Bay Lightning for Martin St Louis, a former league most valuable player and aging dynamic offensive force who became the Rangers’ inspirational touchstone.
When St Louis’s mother suddenly passed away during the East finals against Montreal, the Rangers rallied around their grieving teammate, who found comfort and solace on the ice, scoring the overtime winner in Game Four against the Canadiens to keep New York’s cup push on track.
The close-knit Rangers can find similar inspiration up and down their bench.
Dominic Moore, who scored the only goal in the 1-0 victory that eliminated Montreal, sat out the 2012-2013 season after losing his wife to cancer, while Derek Stepan played the last two games of the series with a broken jaw and cannot eat solid food for six weeks.
Like the Rangers, the Kings added a key piece to their post-season puzzle by acquiring Slovak Marian Gaborik from the Columbus Blue Jackets at the trade deadline.
Gaborik, who had just 11 goals during the regular season, leads the playoffs in scoring with 12. Only Wayne Gretzky with 15 has scored more goals for the Kings in a single postseason.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier