LOS ANGELES — If you play in the NHL and have the good fortune of doing it as part of a team that reaches the Stanley Cup Final, you can gain a pretty good sense of where your career stands on media day.
You may find yourself like Henrik Lundqvist and Drew Doughty, the premier attractions for the New York Rangers and Los Angeles Kings, who occupied prime corner podiums in a curtained off, excessively air conditioned room at Staples Center Tuesday afternoon, hardly visible behind the thick perimeter of cameras surrounding them. Being one of these generational players means you get to say things like, "Yeah, I want to be the best defenceman in the world, no doubt," as Doughty did and may already be.
Or you could find yourself like poor Jesper Fast, a 22-year-old Swede who has played less than a half hour of hockey for the Rangers during these playoffs, and was relegated to a high chair and bistro table area that would seem a bit meagre in an airport Chili’s. He occupied his perch for nearly the entire 30 minutes allotted without anyone so much as glancing in his direction.
"I know I haven’t had a huge impact on us getting here," Fast told me, in what may have been his only interview of the afternoon. "I still got into three games and I can take that with me for the rest of my life. These guys are so good to me — they really make me feel like I’m a part of the team."
And as crushingly melancholic as that last statement may sound, it did seem Jesper was enjoying it. More so, at least, than Kings captain Dustin Brown, who doesn’t enjoy anything resembling attention and at one point looked exasperated as he responded to two reporters who refused to give way to each other’s questions, continuing to talk over each other louder and louder, by looking down anxiously and shaking his head.
Or Brown’s coach, Darryl Sutter, who is uncommunicatively crabby at the best of times and, when asked following his team’s Game 7 victory over Chicago why so many of his players describe the Kings as a special group, responded, "Well, we’re going to try and beat New York."
Everyone approaches it differently, talking with the press, but the shame is that’s all there is to do for now. The hockey doesn’t start until Wednesday night and with the first two games of this final series being played deep in the southwestern United States — basically as far away, continentally speaking, as one can get from the NHL’s nucleus in the northeast — everyone’s still working to get their stuff together.
No one knew this event would even come to California until late Sunday night and that fact was hard to miss when embedded amongst the legion of bleary-eyed east coasters who have arrived here on cross-country flights. The Stanley Cup Final is one of the world’s most complex pop-up shops and the fact the majority of those involved and invested in the league live two time zones away makes the logistics of this massive event even more of a challenge.
Tensions ran exceptionally high in the credentialing trailer; diligent NHL employees were still rolling out the lengths of wire and cordage required to power this operation late into Tuesday afternoon; kind, unsuspecting Staples Center staff were completely overwhelmed by the carnal rush to free food that came in between the availabilities of the Rangers and the Kings, as impatient journalists devoured more than 300 sandwiches in 30 minutes. There could have been blood.
But in spite of it all, we’re almost ready to start playing hockey here, in a city that’s never truly embraced the game — the frequency of local television stations flashing the Sacramento Kings logo when talking about the local hockey team on the news is impressive — despite being home to one of the most successful franchises of the last three years. And that’s fine. Los Angeles is an impulsive kind of place that always has more pressing matters at hand, no matter what cause you’re trumpeting. And you can kind of see how guys like Sutter and Brown would enjoy living with that kind of neglect. There’s comfort in the obscurity.
Which is essentially the antithesis to media day — the ever-crowded, pageantry-rich fireball of commotion that it is. So you can be sure that guys like those two hated it. But for every centre stage NHLer tired of the attention, there’s a wide-eyed, sixth-round draft pick who barely has a hockey-reference page, like Fast, sitting patiently amongst the spectacle, just happy to be along for the ride.
"It’s unbelievable just being here — I’ve never done anything even close to this," Fast said, speaking only for himself, but expressing what everyone who’s come here this week should be feeling. "I can’t think of another word for it. Just unbelievable."