Whicker: LA Kings can't make their playoff history count against San Jose in Game 1

[email protected]

The Kings’ guns were blazing. Their armor was the problem.

They put up three goals and, at the end, had all the bullets they needed to win Game 1 against San Jose. Kyle Clifford missed a yawning yard of net. Tyler Toffoli had daylight and couldn’t cash in. Milan Lucic tried a difficult angle and came up empty.

But the Sharks, trying to shake their wait-till-next-year habits, answered everything the Kings mustered and hung on, through a minute-and-a-half of 5-on-6 hockey. They subdued the Kings, 4-3, to take a 1-0 lead, in a frenzied if imperfect hockey game that was nearly as loud and unlikely as that pageant we all watched here Tuesday night.

Game 1 began with the release of all the playoff energy the Kings hadn’t gotten to spend since Game 5 of the 2014 Stanley Cup Finals, when Alec Martinez picked up a rebound and fired it past Henrik Lundqvist and made a sporting fortress tremble.

Milan Lucic played that first period like an outlaw walking into a saloon. Anze Kopitar stole a puck and put the events in motion that became a goal credited to Jake Muzzin, because he held the puck long enough for Martin Jones to collapse, and then bounced if off the Sharks’ Tomas Hertl.

Then San Jose, using speed and a determined game of denial in the neutral zone, had most of the chances in the rest of the period. Joe Pavelski scored from outside, and when the second period began, Joel Ward won a clean faceoff in the L.A. zone and got the puck back to Brent Bus, who had 75 points from the backline in the regular season. Bus fired it past Jonathan Quick to tie it.

The big crowd was waiting for an SOS — Same Old Sharks — and thought it saw it during a Kings’ penalty kill. Joe Thoton mishandled the puck near Quick, and Trevor Lewis, quiet during the long wintertime march, stole it and went the length of the rink and scored on Jones. That put L.A. up 3-2, since Jeff Carter had managed to bounce a goal off San Jose’s Paul Martin and goaltender Jones. This, it seemed, perfectly illustrated why San jose always melt in the spring like the snowpack.

But maybe not quite yet. Hertl and Ward camped out in the slot and Hertl scored on Quick to tie it. When the third period began, Pavelski slid around the back of the net, got inside Kopitar and slipped a wraparound goal past Quick, and the Sharks led 4-3.

Why wouldn’t the crowd doubt the Sharks? Most of the fans remember 2014 as if it were yesterday, when San Jose brutalized the Kings in Games 1 and 2, took Game 3 in Staples and then disintegrated. The Kings also held off San Jose in 2013. Muscle memory is a real thing, especially when it comes down to wiing muscles. Coming into the game, Kings players who were eligible for this postseason had a total of 30 championship rings. The Sharks had only one, and that belonged to Jones, who, of course, eaed it as a King in 2014, playing understudy to Quick..

Advertisement

And, yes, all the usual suspects were ther for San Jose. Thonrton, Pavelski, Logan Couture, Patrick Marleau and defneseman Marc-Edouard Vlasic have been foils for almost everybody in the Weste Conference, even though the Sharks, since 2004, have the second-best cumulative regular-season record in the NHL, behind Detroit.

New coach Peter DeBoer, who coached New Jersey in 2012 when the Devils lost to the Cup final to Los Angeles, was a new factor in the mix, as was Martin, a respected Easte Conference defenseman before he came over as a free agent.

But just as Darryl Sutter had downplayed the regular-season tendencies and said both teams had to hit the “reset” button, maybe history wouldn’t prove to be automatically repetitive.

This Sharks team was adhesive in the neutral zone, won far more than its usual share of puck battles, and kept boucning back from Kings goals and crowd eruptions. Jones was guarding the goal at least as well as his former teammate on the other end. And the Sharks refused all the invitations for a slugfest, even though Kyle Clifford took down Tommy Wingels with a perfectly timed shoulder hit, and Dustin Brown laid off a Shark D-man after personally stopping a wraparound bid by Ward.

In the end, the fans all walked to the garages and parking lots muttering that a long series is upon them. The Kings certainly hope so. Not that there is any other kind.