The Los Angeles Kings are a professional ice hockey team based in Los Angeles, California. They are members of the Pacific Division of the Western Conference of the National Hockey League (NHL) and are the current Stanley Cup Champions. The team was founded on February 9, 1966, when Jack Kent Cooke was awarded an NHL expansion franchise for Los Angeles, becoming one of the six teams that began play as part of the 1967 NHL expansion. The Kings called The Forum in Inglewood, California (a suburb of Los Angeles), their home for thirty-two years until they moved to the Staples Center in Downtown Los Angeles to start the 1999–2000 season.
The Kings won their division for the only time in their history in 1990–91. They have qualified for post-season play in twenty-four seasons, advancing past the first round twelve times, and past the second round twice. The franchise has won the Western Conference twice.
Their first appearance in the Stanley Cup Finals was in the 1992–93 season, losing to the Montreal Canadiens in five games.
On May 22, 2012, the Kings beat the Phoenix Coyotes 4–3 in overtime in Phoenix to advance to the Stanley Cup Finals for the first time since 1993. On June 11, 2012, the Kings beat the New Jersey Devils 6–1 in Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Finals to win the franchise's first-ever Stanley Cup, becoming the first ever 8th seeded team in North American professional sports to win a championship.
Read more about Los Angeles Kings: Season-by-season Record, Broadcasters
Famous quotes containing the words los angeles, los, angeles and/or kings:
“In the great department store of life, baseball is the toy department.”
—Los Angeles Sportscaster. quoted in Independent Magazine (London, Sept. 28, 1991)
“The freeway experience ... is the only secular communion Los Angeles has.... Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)
“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)
“It breaks his heart that kings must murder still,
That all his hours of travail here for men
Seem yet in vain. And who will bring white peace
That he may sleep upon his hill again?”
—Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931)