Your Net Worth Is What Counts to Win the Cup

The Kings lost a big playoff game to the Vancouver Canucks Sunday.

What’s it mean?

That the Kings are now 0-5 inside Vancouver’s Pacific Coliseum this season.

And what does that mean?

That the Canucks have proven themselves, beyond any shadow of a doubt or rational argument, to be a better hockey team than the Kings. Overall, they are 8-2 against the Kings this season. Overall, they have outscored the Kings in those games, 51-33. The last four meetings, all of them Vancouver victories, have been decided by scores of 6-2, 7-4, 8-6 and 5-2.

And what does that mean?

Absolutely nothing.

These are the NHL playoffs, remember, where a team is only as good as its next game, because the 80-plus that preceded it are required solely for the benefit of local cable operators, who need something to fill the time between beer and Jeep commercials.

This season, 24 NHL teams played 84 regular-season games. Only two teams, Pittsburgh and Boston, won 50 or more games.

Boston lasted precisely four games in the 1993 Stanley Cup playoffs.

Four others won 47 or 48 games.

Three of them--Chicago, Detroit and Quebec--failed to make it out of the first round.

Of the five winningest teams during the regular season, only Pittsburgh advanced to the second round. And the Penguins, two-time defending champions and owners of a league-high 119 points in ‘92-’93, are now down, 1-0, in the Patrick Division finals to a New York Islander team that finished the regular season with 87 points, three games above .500.

In all, six of eight favorites lost in the first round of the playoffs, most prominently:

--Boston, which won 51 games and managed 109 points and was said to be gagging on postseason know-how, so playoff savvy were Ray Bourque, Cam Neely and the rest of these crusty Bruins. First-round opponents: the soft Sabres of Buffalo, unable to advance beyond the first round since 1983.

Result: Buffalo 4, Boston 0.

--Chicago, last year’s Cup runner-up and owner of 106 regular-season points. First-round opponents: The lone-star St. Louis Blues, who spent most of the season trying to trade Brett Hull before closing out at 37-36-11.

Result: St. Louis 4, Chicago 0.

--Detroit, a 103-point offensive powerhouse that led the league in goals but has tended to fall asleep in the postseason, a malady supposedly remedied by the acquisition of Cup collector Paul Coffey. First-round opponents: The long-downcast Toronto Maple Leafs, last-place losers a year ago, and the year before that.

Result: Toronto 4, Detroit 3.

Elsewhere, third-place Montreal eliminated second-place Quebec in the Adams Division; the third-place Kings pummeled second-place Calgary in the Smythe Division; and the third-place Islanders defeated second-place Washington in the Patrick Division, the NHL’s lone concession to postseason tradition.

Washington--first in war, first in peace, first round and out every April.

The old joke about the NHL was that the league played 80 games to eliminate five teams. Then the league added four more games and three more teams, San Jose, Ottawa and Tampa Bay, who have become jokes unto themselves. A laugh riot, this NHL, it next granted franchises to Anaheim/Disney and Florida/Blockbuster Video, who promptly dropped a couple more punchlines on the sport.

The Anaheim team decided to call itself the “Mighty Ducks,” for the purpose of pushing a Disney movie.

The Florida team decided to call itself the “Panthers,” for the purpose of pushing Wayne Huizenga’s backlog of “Pink Panther” videos, of which there hasn’t been a run in years.

The Ducks and the Panthers have signed on as token tomato cans for the next few seasons, but if they take away any knowledge from these no-rhyme, no-reason playoffs, it will be:

1) Invest in a goaltender.

2) Set your sights low. No sense sweating out a first-place finish when seventh or eighth in the conference will suffice just as well.

How do they separate the men from the boys in the NHL? With a Hot Goaltender. Learn it, know it, live it--and if you’ve listened to even one playoff broadcast the past two weeks, the concept of the Hot Goaltender has been permanently laser-burned into your cerebral cortex.

It’s the hot cliche in the press boxes this time of year: Who has the Hot Goaltender?

Buffalo made a midseason trade for one, Grant Fuhr, who personally iced the Bruins in four, prompting Montreal Coach Jacques Demers to observe, “He earned his salary in one series.”

St. Louis came up with another, the previously unheralded Curtis Joseph, who, after shutting out Chicago in Games 2 and 3, now answers to the man in the street as “St. Joseph.”

Felix Potvin, the NHL’s most exalted rookie goalkeeper, was the difference in the Toronto-Detroit series and Patrick Roy, old Mr. Vezina himself, saved the city of Montreal from the siege of heathen Quebec.

Lacking a Hot Goaltender, the next best thing a team can do is carry a better one than the other guy. This explains the Kings’ presence among the final eight. All season long, Barry Melrose has been flipping quarters to see who starts in the nets--Kelly Hrudey or Robb Stauber--and, at one point, got desperate enough to even flip a Knickle out there.

Hrudey will probably be a Duck or a Panther this time next year and Stauber ought to take the ice to the strains of “The Happy Wanderer,” but combined, they were not quite as bad as banged-up Mike Vernon and his replacement, poor, poor, pitiful Jeff Reese, so the Kings were able to dispatch Calgary, 4 games to 2.

But up in Vancouver, there lurks a goaltender named Kirk McLean and, yes, he’s Hot. McLean stopped 25 of 27 Los Angeles shots Sunday and, in three or four more outings, will probably stop the rest of the Kings as well.

But, these are the NHL playoffs, so you never know. Right now, the Kings are 2-8 against the team they must beat four times in the next six games.

Right now, you have to like the Kings’ chances.