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SELL SELL SELL
By Dennis Bernstein
Hockeytalk.biz

JULY 22, 2008 -- LOS ANGELES -- With the American economy in a recession, the stock market has taken a big hit as well and yours truly has firsthand knowledge of it. If the Los Angeles Kings were an equity trading on the open market, the strategy for their shares could be found any week night on Mad Money on CNBC cable network.

The show, hosted by the hyperactive former hedge fund manager Jim Cramer, has a segment called “The Lightning Round” where viewers can call in for an opinion on a particular holding. When a beaten down stock is mentioned by a caller, Cramer presses buttons that have pre-recorded sound effects to embellish his opinion. If I were to call in, the conversation would go something like this…..

“Hello from Southern California, Jim. What’s your opinion on the Los Angeles Kings, symbol LAK?”

“SELL SELL SELL”

Click. Dial tone.

Last week, the press conference naming Terry Murray as the next victim, er, coach of the Kings had all the warmth of a wake.

GM Dean Lombardi looked especially glum, a look that tells even the most casual of observers than Lombardi is concerned for his job given the distance Los Angeles is from contending. His lack of eye contact with the media assembled is an indicator of his concern with respect to how they’ve fallen from a team that contended for a playoff spot in the final weeks of a season to one that now doesn’t play significant games in January. When he arrived in Los Angeles three summers ago, Lombardi conveyed that it would take three years to get the organization to where he wanted it to be. With a second season in the books and the Kings finishing 29th out of 30 teams, that missive is long gone, “for the first time, we’re going to get really young next season,” Lombardi admitted. For those unfamiliar for GM speak, that translates into layman’s terms as R-E-B-U-I-L-D-I-N-G.

In naming Murray to the post, Lombardi welcomed him by saying, “this is the hardest job in the NHL,” not exactly a warm welcome to Hollywood. Part of the reason the job is so hard is due to the GM’s choice of his first coach, the dearly departed Marc Crawford. Though he had impressive credentials on paper, he wasn’t a fit on a couple of different levels. Crawford was a leader for a veteran team, not one with most of their key players with less than five years experience. Last season, it was shown that if Crawford didn’t have a world class goaltender, he wasn’t prepared to coach an effective defensive system. While there was mediocre talent on ice, I’ll argue that Ken Hitchcock didn’t have much more to work with when he joined Columbus and they’re much tighter defensively.

So when Lombardi turned to Murray, what did he get? A coach that’s a teacher, one that’s taken a team to the Finals (but didn’t win it and subsequently got whacked for foolish comments) and one who certainly won’t make this team a playoff contender in the next two years. I wonder what disqualified other coaches with current head coaching experience like former Lightning head man John Tortorella or expelled Leafs bench leader Paul Maurice.

Murray gets credit for going back to his roots after getting busted out of the Flyers job, going into scouting before agreeing to come back behind the bench as an assistant to help John Stevens get the Flyers to the Conference Finals, so the man’s ego isn’t large. But he hasn’t been a head coach for four years and has never coached in the Western Conference, so I have my doubts regarding whether he’s the best choice to lead the Kings out of their current state. The reality is that not even Scotty Bowman could make the improvements that the Kings need to get to the top eight in the highly competitive Western Conference. Murray had the home court advantage of working with Lombardi and assistant GM Ron Hextall in Philadelphia, so that surely weighed heavily in the decision.

The 58 year old coach wore the good soldier hat as he was introduced.

''I am very excited about this opportunity," said Murray. "This will be my biggest challenge as a coach. There is a lot of work ahead and it will take a collective effort to execute the plan we have in place. I am looking forward to training camp and to getting the process under way.''

As training camp opens, the Kings still have the weakest goaltending in the West; Jason LaBarbera had an injury laden season last year and his ultimate destiny in the NHL may be that of a 20 game backup. Erik Ersberg performed admirably in the season’s final third, but that was under no pressure, so the jury is out on the Swedish goaltender. Jonathan Bernier still stands as the future for the franchise but needs at least a year of seasoning in the AHL for a proper apprenticeship and it’s probably wise to shield him from a 2008-’09 season that may be worse than last season’s 71 point disaster. There was a silly rumor floating around a few weeks back that the Kings were considering trading rising star Anze Kopitar for Chicago backstop Nikolai Khabibulin and if that came to fruition, you could turn off all the lights in Casa del Staples. Short of a better deal for Khabibulin, they lack a legitimate number one netminder, a status that Kings’ fans have grown weary of over the past two decades.

They have the semblance of a strong young defensive corps with Jack Johnson, Drew Doughty and Thomas Hickey, but the jelling of those players won’t happen until sometime after the Vancouver Olympics. While they have a good amount of scoring talent along the forward line, they desperately lack the one ingredient that sets playoff teams off apart from the pretenders.

If Murray can instill toughness and a physical presence in this Kings roster, then Lombardi owes him a bonus. The team was soft throughout the entire Crawford tenure and you only need to look 50 miles south to their hockey cousins in Anaheim to see what toughness and physicality means to a franchise. I can’t recall the last time a team came in to Staples Center that had concerns about being intimidated on the ice. The GM took notice of that and made some moves since the season’s end to address the issue, sending Michael Cammalleri to a great situation in Calgary and then shipping Lubomir Visnovsky to Edmonton (just a year after it appeared he was a franchise player by signing him to a lucrative five year deal) for Jarret Stoll and Matt Greene. He also brought in veteran tough guy Denis Gauthier from Philly to help the team’s lone enforcer Raitis Ivanans.

Cammalleri started off hot last season but then succumbed to a neck injury that raised concerns about his durability as a first line player for Los Angeles. Though blessed with superior offensive skills, his lack of size hurt on the defensive end of the ice and he may be best suited as a power play specialist. So while the Kings attempt to get younger and tougher, going down the roster man for man, you can argue that this year’s model ranks 30 out of 30 NHL teams.

There is a lone bright spot to this dilemma for the incredibly loyal fan base. If you call the Kings ticket office today, you can get a better seat location this year as the season ticket fan base is eroding and won’t come back until the team contends.