When sports seasons collide!
The Dodgers won the NL West, the Rams (1-2) and Chargers (2-1) are sorting themselves out, the Kings and Ducks had meaningful preseason losses, and the Lakers and Clippers open camp next week.
Sports seasons used to be clearly defined. creating minimal overlap among the major leagues.
Baseball season started in April and ran through late September or early October (as immortalized in the wonderful song “Six Months out of Every Year” in “Damn Yankees.”) Hockey and basketball would start up around mid-October and end in the early spring. NFL teams for years played 14 games over 14 weeks, ending in early or mid-January—just in time to focus on the most meaningful part of the NHL and NBA marathon schedules.
Longer seasons, the birth of new leagues such as the WNBA, NWSL, and MLS, and the hideous explosion of available playoff berths (you get a wild card spot! and you get a wild card spot!) make for more overlap than ever before. The World Series, once known as the Fall Classic, feels more like the Early-Winter Freeze Out when it bleeds into November. We’re now in one of those spots in the calendar when just about all of the local teams are gearing up for a championship run or starting a new season.
One exception, of course, is the Angels. Facing the worst-in-baseball Chicago White Sox, the Angels were swept in a three-game series and set a single-season franchise record with their 96th loss. They’ll soon go home for another long offseason, a miserable pattern that has led to a decade-plus playoff drought. With no end in sight.
For the Dodgers, the real season is just beginning. After expending more effort than they probably should have needed to exert, they clinched the NL West title on Thursday and a first-round playoff bye with a 7-2 victory over the San Diego Padres. Their starting rotation remains muddled, meaning that their most effective strategy might have to be hoping that Shohei Ohtani can lead their hitters in out-slugging the team’s pitching shortcomings.
“I couldn’t be more proud of those guys,” manager Dave Roberts said in an on-field interview on SportsNet LA. “They fought and fought and fought and overcame adversity.
“We checked box no. 1. There’s a long way to go but we’re going to celebrate tonight.”
And so they did.
While the Dodgers enjoy some time off before the NL Division Series, the Ducks and the Kings are early in their respective exhibition schedules. They’ll face off against each other on Saturday at Toyota Arena in Ontario and on Monday at Honda Center. Preseason games don’t count, but each team has experienced a significant loss that will impact its season.
(The following has been updated with information regarding Drew Doughty’s injury)
The Ducks announced Thursday that goaltender John Gibson had undergone emergency appendectomy surgery on Wednesday, and he’s expected to miss three to six weeks. And on Friday, the Kings announced that defenseman Drew Doughty, who suffered a fractured left ankle in a gruesome collision with the boards during the team’s win at Las Vegas on Wednesday, will undergo surgery and will be out month to month.
The Kings held off on making his status public because he underwent various tests on Thursday. He was seen wearing a boot on his left foot and using a knee scooter to get around the team’s practice facility in El Segundo while reporters were present.
The Kings’ “insider,” Zach Dooley, wrote a post on his blog that encompassed the reactions of players and coaches to Doughty’s injury, as well as the logistics of how they move on. Clearly, there’s no easy solution. They can throw bodies into the lineup and spread out the ice time any of several ways, but no one has the experience and intangibles Doughty brings.
“You don’t want to have Drew out for an extended period of time, but that’s just a sad reality now and we’re gonna have to deal with it,” team captain Anze Kopitar said.
Not only did Doughty average 25 minutes and 48 seconds’ ice time per game last season (second in the NHL) playing all 82 regular-season games and follow that by averaging 27:18 in the Kings’ five-game playoff loss to Edmonton (third in postseason play), he owns a wealth of experience gained over 1,177 NHL regular-season games, two Stanley Cup championships, and two Olympic gold medals. He turned 34 during last season but still produced 15 goals (his most since he scored 16 in 2009-10) and 50 points, including three game-winning goals and seven power-play goals.
Equally important, he’s never afraid to speak out when he feels he and his teammates aren’t playing as well as they should—and when he talks, people listen. He’s the conscience of the team, in some ways, a role that might be difficult for him to fill while he’s recovering and isn’t on the ice every day.
Anyone willing to take on that role must know that being a leader has to come naturally; it can’t be forced or faked, or it won’t be effective. Kopitar leads more by example than by words and is less outwardly emotional than Doughty. At this stage of his career, Kopitar can’t (and shouldn’t) change who he is. Maybe these circumstances will accelerate the development of leadership among some of the younger players, but no matter how well they step up, the Kings will miss Doughty a lot.
As for how the rest of the defense corps picks up the slack, the options aren’t inspiring. Without Doughty, as Dooley noted, “Joel Edmundson is the most senior of the group, with over 500 career NHL games, while Vladislav Gavrikov is over 350 and Mikey Anderson is approaching 300. Anderson is a leader beyond his years, but it can’t be one player to step up and fill those voids.”
This looms as a potential problem, especially as the Kings transition from their tired, old 1-3-1 system to a more aggressive 1-2-2. Anderson is solid—he’s future captain material—and Gavrikov can be physical, but Edmundson is slow and contributes little offensively. Youngsters Brandt Clarke and Jordan Spence will get their chances, but the defensive end of the ice could be a vulnerable spot, at least to start the season.
This is a pivotal season for the Kings, who have been eliminated in the first round of the playoffs by Edmonton each of the past three seasons and have not won a playoff series since they captured the Stanley Cup in 2014. They can’t go out early again and claim to have made progress in a rebuild that has been painfully slow and has taken too many detours because of questionable asset management. Starting the season without Doughty will test their depth and their character right away.
It’s a big season for the Ducks, too. They ranked 30th in the NHL last season in points, goals scored, and goals against, probably the only way they could be called consistent. They’ve built an enviable stockpile of young talent, and those kids will have to help them become competitive, at least, this season.
The biggest expectations among the local teams, of course, rest on the Dodgers. They didn’t give Ohtani a 10-year, $700-million contract with the idea of falling short of the World Series title again. “We like high expectations,” Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers’ president of baseball operations, said amid the champagne-spraying, beer-chugging celebrations in their Dodger Stadium clubhouse Thursday. “We relish them. It beats the alternative, and people just not caring. So people care. They’re passionate about the Dodgers. They have high expectations. So do we. We think that’s a great thing.
“And for us, this is step one. This is what we talked about in spring training—the first step was to win the division and put ourselves in a position to get the bye. We’ve done that, and now the ultimate goal is in mind and we need to do all we can to put ourselves in position to go out and win 11 games.”
It’s time for the Dodgers to live up to those expectations. No more excuses. Same for the Kings. It’s fun when sports seasons collide.