This isn’t a rivalry

The Kings and Ducks “Freeway Faceoff” is time honored tradition of rivalry and intensity, not seen in sport elsewhere. Wait. No, that’s not it. It’s a stupid, ill-named forced rivalry between an old struggling franchise and another one that was based on a quick cash grab that no one takes seriously. The teams have been in the playoffs at the same time a grand total of three times. They have played each other in one playoff series.

Many of the players on the two teams are friendly towards each other when they aren’t playing. Everyone except Jonathan Quick that is, because he hates everyone. Fortunately he may be showing up for this game. Even with the Sharks, most of these guys seemingly lack a level of hatred with each other. They all hate the Canucks though, but that’s largely because of Alexandre Burrows I think. Ryan Kesler also seems like a real piece of shit to deal with (a former Vancouver player too hey I think there is a pattern here), but you can tell most players, including his teammates, just refuse talking with him anymore.

We, the fans, get worked up over these games. But we are idiots investing hours and hours each and every day until we die on a stupid sport put together by inept business shit heels with athletes who have the education of a normal ten year old and have no idea who we are. What I’m trying to say is that our world views can be slightly off.

To amend the title, even long term “rivalries” like Toronto vs Montreal or Boston or whatever the fuck just means we have done this stupid shit for a longer period of time. But Southern California’s rivalry is a forced relationship with a stupid name, akin to Brangelina. We just didn’t adopt a bunch of poor kids so the rivalry is probably closer to Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez or Kim Kardashian and that shitty token white basketball player.

The Ducks have always struggled to be a relevant team, and to be taken seriously.

Once they won a Cup though, well

The Kings just sort of suck from time to time, and have a long history of that. Combine that with 30 or so years of being isolated (mostly) out west in California, and they never had much going on in terms of a geographical rival.

So instead we get a fan contest for a rivalry name, and trying to pretend this means anything with a team based out of a racist suburb full of tile supply shops that seems like if you swapped them and the Tampa Bay Lightning around no one would fucking know or care.

FEEL THE INTENSITY.

Prediction: Not a lot of intensity, and I sleep through a 2-1 loss. Again.