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Town Crier: Your Kings News Roundup (5/23/12)

The Los Angeles Kings are the 2012 Western Conference Champions.

In case you haven’t heard.

In a way, you could say that game kind of encapsulated the 2011-12 LA Kings’ entire season: sucked really bad at the beginning but kept in it by Quick, scored shorthanded goal, took over the game for long stretches yet inexplicably couldn’t score for a while, nearly shut the door before a puck went in off a dude’s shinpad, and then BOOM! Pennercakes.

Oh yeah, there was some hit by the captain that I think the other team was really pissed off about or something. Whatever. If that was overtime in game 7, not game 5, maybe I’d have a little more sympathy for the Desert Dogs. As it is, their whining was mostly just embarrassing. One non-call does not equal a 4-1 series loss, unless you live in Shane Doan’s world I guess.

Links, including those with the aforementioned whining, after the jump!

Game 5 Recaps/General Kings News

  • To the LA Times we go, and they only have three writers covering it at this point, so all three chime in with some sort of game recap. I expect that number to balloon even further once we get to the Stanley Cup Finals (which, by the way, are a week away; on one hand, that sucks, but on the other hand how cool is it to be bitching about when the Kings are going to start playing IN THE STANLEY CUP FINALS?!). I mean, what else do they have to cover? The basketball teams are both done and no one should really care about baseball in late May. Welcome to the bandwagon! [Dillman LAT] [Elliott LAT] [Foster LAT]
  • Rudy Kelly has a gif-happy and kinda NSFW “recap”/celebration. [Battle of Cali]
  • Want to read some quotes from some really angry people making complete and total asses out of themselves after a 4-1 series loss? Rich Hammond fills you in on what the Coyotes had to say after their well-deserved Game 5 loss. Never have I felt less bad for a group of guys. Hello, even if Dustin Brown’s hit was kneeing (and it actually wasn’t if you check the replay), a player on your own team just kneed a guy three games ago! Maybe they have short-term memory problems due to the heat down there, I don’t know. [Kings Insider]
  • Speaking of Coyotes whining, our own Travis Hughes at SB Nation has more on that and why it was dumb. Nice to see a non-Kings-related blogger (and a very smart one at that) calling them out on their crap. [SB Nation NHL]
  • How about some quotes from the good guys? Life in Hockeywood has a collection of quotes from the men in white-and-black. Hey, did you know those are the same colors the referees wear, asks Keith Yandle for some reason? [LiH]
  • Jon Rosen over at Fox Sports West takes a bigger view of what this win means for the Kings in the LA market. Hint: good things. [FS West]
  • As usual, our friends at All the Kings Men have those of you sick of reading things covered with a quick 15-minute post-game podcast. [AtKM]
  • This was actually posted by the Kings a while ago during that Sacramento Kings local media wackiness, but I don’t think I’ve linked to it yet. It’s a “cheat sheet” for our wonderful and knowledgeable media. Pretty hilarious. [Kings]
  • Over at the Arizona Republic, here’s a Phoenix perspective on the series coming to a close and what it could mean for the Coyotes going forward. Apparently they’re not moving, or so they say. At this point the only place I want to see this collection of players moved to is the center of the sun. [AR]
  • In case you missed this, the full Stanley Cup Finals schedule was released yesterday. Obviously this is now extremely relevant for us. Game 1 kicks off next Wednesday, May 30th. [Puck the Media]
  • No other section today, because it’s the Conference Finals; there’s honestly not much else going on, you know? The only other series still going on is, of course, the Eastern Conference Finals, which will play Game 5 tonight in a 2-2 series. The #1 New York Rangers will host the #6 New Jersey Devils (5:00 pm PST/NBC Sports Network) and someone will take a 3-2 lead. Honestly, I like the Rangers; I apologize to those of you who don’t believe in having a “second-favorite team”, because they’re pretty much it for me. But I’m coming off such a high with the Kings winning that it’s really hard to even care if “dah Rangahs” win this series right now, especially knowing that I’ll just be rooting against them in the next round anyway. At this point I just want it to go seven games, with multiple overtimes, while hopefully the LA Kings are sitting on a beach somewhere being handed margaritas.

That’s all for now folks. As usual, correct me on broken links, add your own in the comments, and follow me on Twitter (@kinghawkranger). Especially that last one because I’m going to start bleeding Rangers followers over the next week or two here.

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