Mr. Bettman, Ban The L.A. Kings From The Playoffs

We must save whatever integrity the NHL playoffs have left.

I don't call on you to do much, Mr. Gary Bettman. I know your job is to make your bosses more money, and you've done that. The game does continue to grow, though I don't really know that you had much to do with it. Perhaps you've done nothing more than not get in the way, which is good enough. It's a lesson your colleague, Mr. Manfred, could learn from.

Whatever you have or haven't done, the game itself is better. It's faster, there are more goals, more chances, more skill. Again, I don't know that you did anything to restock the league with young stars who will take over from the last generation. But you're in the chair, you can't big ignored. Well done, I guess.

I don't even get on your case about the playoff format. Sure, I'd like it to be a straight, divisional set-up with no conferences. These wildcards are kind of stupid, if you apply any logic to it. But I get it, I know the players pushed for it, and you probably got some concession in the CBA out of it. I think you're missing out by not even allowing for the possibility of a greater combination of Final opponents one day, but I'm not going to bend my nose out of shape about it.

But you're still the protector of the integrity of the playoffs, Commissioner. You won't change the standings system, which is chipping away at that integrity, because you want to keep your bosses' contending status inflated. We all know, you know, they know, and yet it never changes. We accept it. We accept that we have to read beyond the standings to know who is really what, but then return to these false readings to know who actually gets in. Hockey fans have to speak two languages, as it were. How very hockey that is.

But there is one thing you must do, and you must do it in the next week. Sir, you have to ban the Los Angeles Kings from the playoffs.

Sir, you cannot let this abomination into the postseason. This kind of ineptness cannot be rewarded in any way. It must be sent to a dark corner to think about what it's done all summer. It must promise to do better to get rewarded, or it must leave us alone, forever. This aggression cannot stand, man.

Do I have to point out that the Kings have just 19 regulation wins? The only team with less are the Vancouver Canucks, an organization that everyone in hockey, including those in British Columbia, has agreed to forget exists. When the only team beaten when hockey is hockey, and not some carnival game you invented because you think hockey fans will turn inside out if anything ends in a tie, is a ghost ship of fuckwits and fuck-arounds, they cannot be allowed to play any more than the minimum required.

The Kings have less regulation wins than the Rangers, whom their own fans have tried to bar from ever entering MSG. And five less wins! That's two weeks worth! They have two less regulation wins than the Hawks, who are just a Ponzi scheme. Does that sound like a worthy entry into the cauldron of the NHL playoffs? They are not worthy of a death in front of the emperor, Mr. Commissioner. They are fodder for being tossed outside the walls into the mud and run over by carriages carrying waste and tripe.

They have a -25 goal-difference. This is the mark of the truly lost. Yes, the Islanders and Flyers, both competing for playoff spots in the East, have -3 goal-differences. But the Flyers entire existence is based on being a mutated form, a mirror held up to the rest of us to show how disfigured we pretend not to be. The Islanders at least had the decency to become a drama. And their jerseys rule.

Yes, their rivals down I-5 also have a negative GD. But the Ducks have the chutzpah to turn every game into bouncy castle dodgeball. Even if they get mullered in the first round, it'll be worth watching. Let the Kings in, and you'll get four games of a Ted talk performed by a donkey. There is no chutzpah on Figueroa Avenue, good sir. There's barely shpilkes.

The Kings? No hockey fan can name three Kings, at least ones that aren't made of Metamucil (Kopitar and Doughty). Kopitar skates around now like the old person still working in the stockroom that is a symbol of how Social Security is broken. Doughty was always a swamp creature, except now a swamp creature takes better angles in the defensive zone.

Does any hockey fan know anything about the Kings, other than they suck? They're boring, they're slow, and they just look like pieces of plaque meandering around the ice. They play like it, too. Did you know they fired their coach this season? Do you have any idea who it was? Whom they hired? No, because it doesn't matter. It's probably the same guy, and no one bothered to look hard enough to notice.

I know you love your 3-on-3, Commish. Built-in highlights easily accessed on a phone, which you've been chasing ever since you burdened us with the shootout in 2005. Still chasing Sportscenter, which has now just become TikTok. But you cannot reward this level of insistence on it. For a team to enter the hallowed ground of the playoffs, they have to show any kind of competence at the actual sport. They have to demonstrate that they can not run into each other consistently when there's 10 skaters on the ice. The Kings are a mockery of the world you've created.

You have to do this for you, Gary. They've taken your ideas and warped them into a monstrous sculpture of ennui. You thought you were giving fans a gift, a unique bridge to save us from the roiling pool of lava that is "a tie." The Kings have dry-humped it into a Picasso from hell. You cannot allow this.

Ban them. Decree their season over. Believe me, barely anyone will notice. Those who do will muster no more than a shrug. Because that's all the Kings deserve.