As you may have noticed, we hockey bloggers at SBN have been paired up for some cross-conference Q&A in an effort to help fans get a little more knowledgeable about some of the teams they might not be devoting as much attention towards – and get SBN users to realize just how many great blogs there are on our network.
Japers’ Rink drew the Los Angeles Kings, a team whose rebuild is almost complete, and hence should be interesting to follow in 2009-10. RudyKelly at Battle of California has already been so kind as to post our answers to his questions and we’re going to return the favor (our questions, his answers) after the jump.
Realistic? Sure. If Anze Kopitar plays better and scores about 80 points, if Drew Doughty continues to be the greatest man in history, if the goaltending holds up, if the Kings continue to play good defense, if Ryan Smyth brings some sort of leadership to the team, if Justin Williams recovers from his injuries to play up to his early potential, the Kings can make the playoffs. All of those are realisitc. All of them happening in one season? Maybe not so realistic. The Kings should be in that 7-10 region this season.
Yeah, the Kings struggle to gain any sort of market share because they share money with all the sports teams in the area and also with Disneyland, Universal Studios, Knott’s Berry Farm, the Getty, and a thousand other awesome things to do in LA and Orange County. The Kings have been around long enough that most people know they’re there, but people in LA don’t pay attention to losers. When the Kings make the playoffs Staples is jumping, and they’ll make some noise with the media when they get there soon.
We are lucky that we have probably the best local beat site in the country (Rich Hammond at the Los Angeles Daily News) and Kings fans tend to some of the more dedicated fans around. There are also some good blogs if you’re interested, like A Queen Among Kings and The Royal Half among others. Overall, I’m fairly happy with our coverage because frankly I don’t need the competition.
It’s not so much that the Kings are confident in Jonathan Quick as they are confident that one of Quick/Bernier/Erik Ersberg will play well. Quick is the incumbent and played very well in his first taste at NHL action (2.48 GAA, .914 SV% in 44 games), while Ersberg is a fairly reliable back-up as long as he plays about 20 games or so.
Jonathan Bernier is the big question mark this season. He made the Kings out of camp 2 years ago as a 19 year-old but was sent back to Junior to save him from the Kings’ porous defense. He has a bit of a track record of pouting when things don’t work out for him; his play suffered after he lost out to Steve Mason at the World Juniors a couple years ago and he pouted last year after Bernier didn’t make the Kings out of camp. The Kings are fairly lucky because Quick is probably good enough right now while Bernier should hopefully be great in the future. We’ll see.