Saturday, June 2, 2012

13-2: The Best Kings Streak Ever?

Through Game 1 of the 2012 Stanley Cup Finals, the Kings have a 13-2 record in the playoffs. It got me to wondering, is this the best streak the Kings have ever been on?

If you go back to about two weeks after the trade deadline on March 11, the Kings are actually 23-4-3 in their last 30 games, including regular season and playoffs. Extrapolate that out to a full season of 82 games and you're looking at something like 63 wins and 134 points, which would be the most in both categories any team has ever put up in a single season (the 1995-96 Red Wings set the all-time wins record with 62 and the 1976-77 Canadiens still own the single-season points record at 132).

This is, hands down, the best run in team history.

But surprisingly, there have been a few regular season stretches that weren't far off. They started the 1974-75 season 15-2-9 and didn't lose consecutive games until just before Christmas. Later that same season they put together a 13-1-3 streak. Other streaks comparable to those are when they went 9-0-2 from February 28 to March 24, 1974, a 10-1-1 run to open the 1980-81 season, an 11-1-3 streak last January and February, and finally, they went 13-2-5-2 from February 22, 2001 to the end of the season on April 7, a run that preceded the second-best Kings playoff drive in franchise history before this year.

The best winning streaks in team history are an 8-game winning streak from February 15 to March 9, 1992, the longest in team history until they won 9 in a row two years ago (actually part of a 13-2-1 streak from January 14 to March 2, 2010). And of course, in the midst of this current streak they won 8 playoff games in a row from Game 5 of the opening round through Game 3 of the conference finals.

Whatever happens in the next couple of games, this has been a remarkable run for the ages by this Kings team.

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