The Kings Might Hate Darryl Sutter, But That's Not Why They Didn't Make the Playoffs

The Stanley Cup playoffs start this week, and now we know why the defending champion Los Angeles Kings aren't in them: The players hate their coach, Darryl Sutter.

It's not that one of the team's best players, Slava Voynov, has been about to stand trial on domestic violence charges for months, or that the Kings have played playoff games into May and June for three years running, or that the league has become a heterogeneous mélange of evenly matched teams, all with butterfly goalies and a hard-charging dump-and-chase style—world-class athletes trying to corral a bouncing puck on an ice surface that's too small for their speed and size, forcing games to end in shootouts (something the Kings were horrible at this year, their shooters going a dismal 5-for-35 against opposing goalies).

No, no, it's Sutter.

Such was the suggestion in a column by Larry Brooks in the New York Post over the weekend that has forced the Kings to address whether the team—the first reigning Stanley Cup champ since the '06-'07 Carolina Hurricanes to miss the playoffs—has a serious dissension issue.

Things got so bad, the column said, that the players locked Sutter out of the dressing room during a bleak stretch of road play late in the regular season, even setting up "three heavy waste receptacles" as barriers once Sutter got the door opened.

Defensive Kings fans wrote the report off as fabrication, or at the very least, exaggeration. But yesterday, Kings general manager Dean Lombardi confirmed that the incident happened. Not at the end of the season, as Brooks reported, but in February, Lombardi said, after a win in Tampa Bay.

Wait, after a win? This made the incident more difficult to read: Was it a team-building prank? Super-duper closed-door meeting? A simple misunderstanding, given that Kings were also being followed at the time by a film crew for Epix ahead of their nationally televised outdoor game against the Sharks?

Or was it, quite possibly, the team staging a revolt against Sutter, so recently celebrated for his idiosyncratic, hockey-player-whisperer ways, and said—including by me in a profile of Sutter I did for Los Angeles Magazine—to have bonded the team as it won two Cups in three years?

GM Lombardi, who has Derek Jeter's No. 2 jersey hanging in his office, told reporters: "I don't know if I like the way it happened, but if you look at great teams, the perfect example is Derek Jeter. When Joe Torre was ready to blow or something, Jeter would walk in the room and go, `Whoa, whoa, whoa, I got this one. Stay out, and don't be losing it.'"

Not sure if Jeter then locked Torre out of the room and put up trash receptacles to make sure he didn't return. I see a baseball analogy here, too, but from the climactic scene in the original "Bad News Bears." During the movie's pivotal championship game between the Bears and Yankees, one of the Bears hits a ground ball back to the Yankees pitcher Billy, who defiantly holds onto the ball as various Bears circle the bases and score. It's Billy's act of revenge against the abusive coach-father who'd smacked him in the face earlier in the game.

Of course, the Kings are professional athletes who apparently understand the power of metaphor (notice they chose trash cans for barriers, as in trash talking, as in they didn't want Sutter giving them anymore shit).

Sutter himself weighed in on the episode today with his typical mix of slow-burn sarcasm and elliptical question-statements. "Do you have family?" he said. "So once in a while do you close the door and talk to your family?"

It's worth noting that, while the Kings were outside the playoff bubble for much of the year, Sutter was his players' great defender, pointing out even when they lost that his team was playing pretty well, particularly given the gauntlet of quality opponents at every stop (attention, Stanley Cup bettors—Sutter seems to like the Minnesota Wild this season).

And he was mostly right. The Kings ended the season 13 games over .500, for 95 points, five points fewer than 2013-14, when they won their second Cup. Making the playoffs came down to a few better dekes in shootouts, a few bounces. Even a week ago, the talk was that no one would wanted to see the Kings in the playoffs.

Good news, they won't. As for Sutter, the bigger, more unanswerable question is how many points a coach is worth, or not worth. I can't say I ever really got at his relationship with the players back in September, when I was as around the team as the Kings will let anyone be.

Darryl lets you hear it if he doesn't think you're playing well, or versions thereof, was about as far as any of the players would go. The team was being talked about as the first repeat champions in the NHL since the 1997-98 Red Wings. They were a big, bruising, championship-tested group with its core—goaltender Jonathan Quick, center Anze Kopitar, defenseman Drew Doughty—in their prime. Sutter himself gave off the image of a deeply honorable contrarian, a guy most at peace—"be quite honest," to quote an oft-repeated phrase of his—running his farm in Western Canada.

This is his fourth head-coaching job. At each stop, Sutter has been the kind of hard-ass coach who gets results, until he becomes the kind of hard-ass coach who augurs change. He is said to be a master at knowing whom to play and when—he reads the game exceptionally well, even if he didn't read the post-game well on Feb. 7 in Tampa.

For the record, here's what he told the media after that 4-2 win by the Kings over the Lightning, a victory that ended a three-game road losing streak. "We gave up too many scoring chances, which is what we've come to expect, and so we need to score more than two goals. Tonight, we did."

Sometime after this, presumably, he fetched a maintenance man to open the locker room door, unaware that his players were either punking him or just tired of him. Either way, the Kings then won seven more in a row.