The Kings Need a Loan…Seriously.
Do you have $160 the LA Kings can borrow?
I don’t usually blog sports stories, per say. I leave that to the ESPNs, Fox Sports, NBC Sports, CBS Sports, and even USA Todays of the world. But this story was just too, too weird and quite funny that I had to share.
I’m not sure how closely you, my lovely #HungryFans, follow hockey. I imagine there’s a good chunk of you that do. Nonetheless, over the weekend, a very interesting story emerged from LA, home of the Kings. The Stanley Cup-winning team (last season) faced an unusual problem.
To understand this strange problem fully, I feel I need to give you a little info. Specifically, you should know that in the NHL, when a player goes down with an injury, standard NHL protocol is for a team to call a replacement player up (if necessary) from its AHL farm team. Unfortunately, this weekend, the LA Kings simply could not afford to! That’s right, you heard me correctly, folks! No could do! (Whoa right)?
The NHL’s current salary cap is $69 million/year. Winning the Stanley Cup pretty much (usually) means that your team’s roster is expensive, especially after having just won.
The Kings’ Slave Voynoz was recently suspended (for alleged domestic violence…not great if true) but the team still has $4.167 million in frozen funds set aside for him. Then on Friday, the team lost Robyn Regehr, another d-man, leaving the Kings with a big-ass problem: how to pay to bring in his replacement?
I wish I could say they needed like $1 million to bring someone in. In my mind this would all then make a little more sense. But sadly, that wasn’t the case. What was the price tag to bring up a farm team player? $160! Yes, one-hundred-and-sixty-US-dollars.
The Kings’ head office executives scrambled to submit for NHL salary cap relief. They even asked fans (seemingly in jest) for a little help…
The team’s requests for special dispensation from the league were denied. De-niiiiied! Ouch! So what happened? The LA Kings were forced to go into Saturday night’s game against the Vancouver Canucks with just 5 players on defense.
Before you log onto espn.com to check the score…let me cut to the punchline. Whoever said you needed 6 defensemen to win a game was seriously deranged. At least when it’s the LA Kings vs. the Vancouver Canucks (no offense, my Vancouver friends). The LA Kings won the game 5–1. One goal for each defenseman! Boo-yah!
This begs the question (and please feel free to comment below)….is defense in hockey overrated?
