The Kings' torturous playoffs end with the Stanley Cup and Rangers stunned

For the second time in three years, the Los Angeles Kings are Stanley Cup champions. It took an extra 34 minutes and 43 seconds of hockey on Friday night, over and above the regular 60, to seal the deal, as the Kings won a thriller against the New York Rangers 3-2 in double-overtime.

Unlike the last two games they played against the Rangers on home ice, the Kings were the first to score, when Justin Williams backhanded his ninth past Rangers goalie Henrik Lundqvist six minutes into the first period.

Friday's game was the 26th playoff game this year for the Kings, and that goal was Williams’s 25th point. And it held for a time – deep into the second period, in fact. But with Dwight King in the box for a high stick on Mats Zuccarello with six minutes left in the frame, the Rangers tied it up.

The Kings pressed as the second period drew to a close, while the Rangers’ Dominic Moore sat in the box with just over two minutes left before intermission on a hooking call. Those last-minute goals before a period ends are often devastating, and can swing momentum just before everyone retires to the dressing room – the sort of twist that can infect a player's psychological state. And sure enough, the puck crossed the goal line – just at the opposite end of the ice.

Short-handed, speedy Ranger Carl Hagelin outmuscled Slava Voynov along the boards in the neutral zone, and flipped the puck over to Brian Boyle who was skating up the middle. Boyle did the rest, snapping a quick one up and over the left shoulder of Kings goalie Jonathan Quick to put the Rangers ahead 2-1.

It was the perfect chance for the Rangers to push things fully in their direction. They could have come out in the third and pressed the Kings as they finally did in Game 4, back in New York. The Rangers did neither. As had been the case in the first period, it took the Rangers ages to even register a shot on Quick when they returned to the ice. It was a full eight minutes into the third before the Rangers got a shot on the Kings’ net – and not until after Marian Gaborik had already tied it for the Kings, like this:

Overtime was therefore needed, and things were closer. The Kings tried 13 times in the first extra frame to put one past Lundqvist; the Rangers threw 10 at Quick. But nothing doing. They moved on to the second overtime, where there were more close calls early on. Check out how close Rick Nash came to ending it for New York, had it not been for Voynov’s stick:

A few minutes later that miss was haunting. With just over five minutes left in double OT, the Kings left their zone on a 3-on-2. Alec Martinez fed the puck over to Tyler Toffoli, who led a shot go at Lundqvist. The Ranger goalie stopped it, but couldn’t control the rebound, which fatefully ended up back on Martinez’s stick. And that was it.

A little while later, LA captain Dustin Brown hoisted the Cup on home ice again.

It’s a far cry from where they were a little less than two months ago, down three games to zip in the first round to the San Jose Sharks. At the time, Kings coach Daryl Sutter said the deficit was a “tough hill” but added that “we won’t go quietly away, that’s for sure.” An understatement of epic proportions, in hindsight. The Kings came back to win that series in the necessary seven, as they would have to against the Anaheim Ducks in the second round and then once more against the Chicago Blackhawks in the third.

Mapped out in advance, it would have seemed an insane (the most insane?) route to the Stanley Cup, but as much as the route taken speaks to the Kings' never-say-die spirit, their uncanny ability to appear unfazed by being down a couple of goals – or games – at crucial points, their trajectory to a championship says even more of the team’s conditioning. The Kings are among the handful of teams in the NHL who travel more than 45,000 miles during the regular season (most of them are in the west), meaning that while the schedule of home and away games might look the same as most anywhere else, the amount of time spent on the road is very different.

And yet, this is the second time the Kings have pulled this off, rising from southern California under Sutter’s guidance to be a fearsome physical and talented team. And, as the Globe and Mail’s James Mirtle pointed out last night on Twitter with the help of CapGeek.com, the Kings are in a good position to put virtually the same team on the ice next season.

So, look out everyone.

We can’t leave this season behind without a few more notes, however.

What happened to the Rangers? Considered broadly, it’s a question for the team’s management and coaching staff (and players, for that matter) to ponder over the summer, and it’s for them to think about the makeup of the squad, the way it operates, trains and so forth. But what of this series, specifically? How did it all go so wrong?

Prior to Game 5, over at FiveThirtyEight, Neil Paine noted just how dire the situation looked for the Rangers. With their Game 4 win at home, the Rangers had improved their chances of taking the series to only 11.1%, but that’s nothing. When Paine considered “whether the sequence of wins and losses matters in a 3-1 series”, the results suggested “the Rangers picked the worst possible sequence of wins and losses for a team down 3-1.”

But no surprise, perhaps. New York never really had stats on its side in this series – even the really straightforward ones. Take those shots-on-goal tallies, for instance. The Rangers might have pushed the Kings to double overtime on Friday night, but along the way they were out-shot 51 to 30. Over the five games of the series, the Kings out-shot the Rangers 194 to 146. That includes Game 4, which the Kings lost, but in which they still managed to out-shoot the Rangers an eye-popping 41 to 19.

Very basically speaking, if you’re not shooting on goal, you’re not giving yourself much of a chance to score.

And even when the Rangers did score, they couldn’t make it stick. Much of that can be attributed to the Kings, of course, but learning to defend a lead – especially against the machine-like churning of a Kings bench – ought to be a skill placed high on the team’s list of priorities for next year, if there’s even a way to learn such a thing. After all, how do you teach confidence?

On the things that can’t be learned, there was, of course, that small matter of luck we discussed a few days back. The Kings seemed to have more of it, the Rangers could only muster enough for one game. There were a few posts hit again on Friday night on both sides, and some close calls along the goal line, but no moment was more confounding, more given to speculation of random chance then when Martin St Louis moved to his favourite spot – right around the face-off circle to the goaltender’s left – and, just as he was about to receive a perfectly-placed pass that would have surely resulted in a goal, stumbled on his own skate blade.

There’s no explaining it. There is also apparently no video that I can find, which is rather fitting, in a way, but it would have made for a good lasting image of the entirety of the Rangers’ final five games of the 2013 season: result almost achieved, had it not been for the self-inflicted slip-up.

Only minutes after the Kings bench unloaded onto the ice in celebration of Martinez’s winning goal, the CBC up in Canada cut out. The screen went green for a moment, then, when the picture returned, it was a split screen of the NBC broadcast. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman was seen in two parts, having been decapitated by the feed.

— Jay K-ski (@jkski19) June 14, 2014

I Duno I thought he looked pretty good this year after CBC screwed up the feed pic.twitter.com/QWuvshm09k

The picture returned to normal after a few minutes and CBC’s team was able to carry out its traditional on-ice, post-Cup interviews – the kind that made this ad one of the NHL’s best of the last few years – and with time enough to show its closing montage.

The show must go on, in whatever form it takes. To the next season, then, and all that it brings.