Larry Brown Sports

The Los Angeles Kings may never get any respect from the media on the west coast. Despite the fact that the team is the reining Stanley Cup champions, local and national news outlets seem to know very little about it.

The photo you see above was tweeted by Bailey, the Kings’ official mascot, who wanted to give the folks at NBC Los Angeles a little assistance in properly identifying their hockey team’s players. The gentleman in the top photo is Kings wing Dustin Penner, not head coach Darryl Sutter. The young man on the bottom is actually Jarret Stoll.

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The Los Angeles Kings won their first Stanley Cup in franchise history and will be receiving their championship rings on opening day. Even though their rings aren’t supposed to be unveiled until then, it looks like there has already been a leak.

According to Puck Daddy, Francesca Leiweke, the daughter of AEG CEO Tim Leiweke (AEG owns the Kings), shared a photo on her Instagram account Thursday of the ring seen above. She later deleted her post, but the photo was preserved by a Twitter user for all of us to see.

The Kings actually had a press conference on Thursday to celebrate the new season beginning, and they sent their ice girls around to local McDonald’s to raffle off replica rings. It’s possible Leiweke was just sharing a picture of a replica ring. Either way, we still have a good idea of what the rings will look like.

During the Stanley Cup playoffs this year, it became apparent the L.A. Kings’ official Twitter account was a social media incarnation of Don Rickles. As the Kings made their run all the way to winning the Cup, their Twitter feed was a nonstop stream of snarky and funny tweets. The guy in change of running the account was on point just as much as the team he works for was on the ice.

Apparently @LAKings hasn’t lost a step since the season ended. But in an exchange with the UFC’s official Twitter, the snark may have been taken a little too far:

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The Kings just don’t seem to be able to get any respect in Los Angeles. Whether it’s local TV stations using the wrong Kings mascot or team logo during telecasts, there has been an ongoing struggle with the LA media to get things straight.

On Thursday, KTLA tossed live to a helicopter for a traffic report and the reporter talked about covering the “Lakers victory parade.” I’m sure he was just saying that out of habit considering the Lakers have won five titles since 2000, but the parade was for the Kings, which actually won a championship and didn’t lose in the second round of the playoffs.

You gotta do better than that.

Stick tap to Puck Daddy

The LA Kings’ plans to withhold stats from Devils coaches as payback were made public after en email was accidentally sent to the media.

The Kings apparently were upset that the team’s coaches didn’t get stats from the Devils’ PR staff until the final two minutes of the second intermission during Game 5, so they’re planning to do the same in Game 6.

Here’s what the email, that was accidentally sent to members of the media, said:

“Jersey PR (whether it was their fault or not) didn’t get stats to our locker room until about two minutes left in the intermission. Our coaches were not happy about this. So we are going to do the same to them tomorrow.

“So unless you hear otherwise from me make sure their locker room does NOT get stats UNTIL about two minutes left to go in the intermission. Even if you literally have to eye the clock and wait. If they ask what’s taking so long just tell them our copy machines are down.”

Ah, the old copier was down excuse. That’s going to be my go-to excuse in life from now on. When people talk about home field or home ice advantage, this is just one example of the many advantages a team can have.

Relax, Devils fans, it could be much worse.

H/T Deadspin

Either Wednesday night’s Stanley Cup Finals game in Los Angeles was the first time Charlie Sheen has ever attended a professional sporting event, or it was the first time the American icon has not been given preferential treatment. According to TMZ, Sheen left Staples Center at some point before or during Game 4 between the Kings and Devils for a cigarette break. The security guard decided that the “no re-entry” rule applies to movie stars as well as common fans, and Sheen was not allowed back into the arena.

As you can see in this video over at TMZ.com, Sheen flipped out on the female security guard before eventually leaving.

A female, no-nonsense security guard would not budge when Charlie tried to get back in, then Charlie snapped, yelling, “You know what?  F**king blow my balls, alright, you f***ing asshole.”

A little later Charlie’s buddies try in vain to keep him away from the camera. The “Anger Management” star then explains, “Have common sense and common courtesy gone in society? That was what I was trying to impress upon her.”

TMZ also added that a fan asked Sheen if he has ever tried bath salts when he first arrived at the Staples Center, to which he responded: “Would you ask me that at a f***ing dinner party, you moron? Go f*** yourself.”

Just a guess here, but I can’t imagine this is the first time Charlie has left a sporting event for a smoke break. Judging by the way he reacted, I’m guessing it’s the first time a security staffer told him no re-entry means no reentry.

Wait, so Devils were playing in Los Angeles and it wasn’t a home game? (I really could have used a response from a sidekick like Ed McMahon for that one.) It’s almost official. The L.A. Kings are having their name removed from a rather lengthy list of teams never to have won a Stanley Cup. In response to the team’s meteoric rise, most of the city has come to realize that there is no monarchy within the city limits but indeed a pretty good hockey team.

Los Angeles and hockey is a funny concept. Think about it. The closest thing to icy the city ever gets is the daily interaction between fellow drivers on the 405. Vulcanized rubber? Sure, if you’re thinking about the constituency of a starlet’s face, not a hockey puck. Fighting and violence have traditionally been confined to Chavez Ravine, a few miles north. However, since the beginning of the 2012 NHL annual marathon postseason, Los Angeles has been the center of the universe for the so-called “fastest game on earth.”

Since the Los Angeles Kings ascended to the throne in 1967, the team has been more of a veritable peasant in a sports market saturated with more popular sports. For many years, the running joke in the league while the Kings played in the Forum was that the folks across the street had a better chance at the Cup than did the franchise. (The team’s former home was situated next to a cemetery.) The latest slapshot in the face was when the Los Angeles-area NBC affiliate tried to show a graphic celebrating three simultaneous playoff runs with the Lakers, Clippers, and Kings all in the postseason for the first time since the opening of Staples Center, where all three play, in 1999. The only problem was that the Kings logo was portrayed as the Sacramento Kings. Perhaps, one can chalk this up to a lazy graphics editor, not realizing the fundamental fact that Sacramento (scrawled across the top of the logo) is not Los Angeles, or the fact that double-checking wasn’t all that necessary because no one would care. One would highly doubt that such an error would happen in hockey-crazed markets like Detroit or Boston.

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