Final Thoughts on 2011-12 NHL Season: Obligatory Post No. 1

Seeing as it's July, I should probably go ahead and bang out these two usual footnotes to the conclusions of the winter sports seasons. I'll start off with the Los Angeles Kings, since they wrapped up their title first.

The picture to the right there is probably one of the most wonderful little reasons to feel genuinely happy for this team. The other, however, is simply the fact that they went out there and flat-out fucking earned it. Seriously. New Jersey deserves some credit for winning as many games as the entire Western Conference did against L.A. in the previous three rounds, but the Kings seriously just went out there and took the damn thing.

Ordinarily, yes, I generally loathe pretty much any sports championship team that comes out of Hell-A. The Kings, however, are not the Dodgers nor the Lakers. As demonstrated by the local media's screwing up such basic concepts as the team's logo to how to pronounce a star's name to forgetting the last time the team made it this far, there is some temptation to think "they don't really deserve it." The "they" being the residents that were just now getting word of the bandwagon. No, Chicago never had any of those.

In the end, however, how can a Hawks fan not be happy for Daryl Sutter? And how can you not appreciate the way the entire club played right from the beginning of every game. The Kings took the first three games of each best-of-seven series in all four rounds. There was rarely a moment they didn't seem to be completely controlling the puck. And during those moments that they were on the defense, then how can you not look at Jonathan Quick's play and want a goalie like that playing for your favorite team?

There is no denying that for the longest time, I've wanted an eight-seed to win it all. It reinforces that belief that anything's possible in the NHL playoffs, but I never would have expected an eight-seed to do it quite like the Kings just did. That was a level of dominance that you would normally expect from the top teams.

Moreover, the Kings winning the Cup might also send a message to certain general managers about taking gambles during the season. Kings GM Dean Lombardi called his trade deadline acquisition of Jeff Carter a "Hail Mary," and it won him the Cup. 

As for the prediction records, James Murphy and John Buccigross, both from ESPN, finished with records of 10-5, although Murphy had four series this postseason predicted in the exact number of games while Buccigross only did that once. I, meanwhile, had pretty much the opposite score, going 5-10 with only one "exacta" for another year of really awful predicting on my part.