Grab bag: I for one welcome our new lacrosse overlords

In the Friday Grab Bag:
- Sorry, old school, the era of the lacrosse move has arrived
- We need to stop twisting ourselves into knots over what an expansion team is
- An Easter-themed obscure player
- The week's three comedy stars
- And we got back 28 years to watch Dave Taylor go back 13 more years in an April Fools' YouTube clip

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

Take the quiz: How well do you know the LA Kings?

While the Rangers and Devils were continuing their battle for Eastern Conference supremacy last night, the team they were competing to face in the Finals was enjoying some time off. The Los Angeles Kings wrapped up their series with the Coyotes on Tuesday to complete a stunning 12-2 run through the Western Conference, and will likely enter the Finals as the consensus favorite.

That's a shocking development, considering they barely made the playoffs and were considered a team in turmoil only a few months ago. Combine their lackluster season with their status as a West coast franchise that typically doesn't get much coverage in the rest of North America, and it's likely that many hockey fans don't know as much about the team as they'd like.

How well do you know the Los Angeles Kings? Take this quiz and find out.

For their debut season in 1967, team owners chose the colors purple and gold for the Kings' first uniforms because:
a.) They were considered traditional colors of royalty.
b.) They were the same colors worn by the Los Angeles Lakers.
c.) They wanted to use up at least one eye-gougingly awful color combination before the mid-90s expansion teams arrived and took them all.
d.) Hey, nothing says intimidation like a mildly bruised banana.

In the late 1970s, the line of Marcel Dionne, Charlie Simmer and Dave Taylor was known as "The Triple Crown Line" because:
a.) There were three of them, and the Kings' logo was a crown.
b.) The phrase "triple crown" is frequently used in various sports to denote excellence.
c.) The long-time NHL employee in charge of naming lines by just taking each player's initial and making it spell something was apparently sick that day.
d.) They wanted to save the name "600 lbs of unstoppable force" for future use by Dustin Penner.

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Great Obscure Moments in Leafs History - Everything that happened immediately after the Clark-McSorley fight

Great Obscure Moments in Leafs History - An ongoing series to honor the greatest, completely meaningless moments in Toronto Maple Leaf history.

Wendel winding up: the last thing
hockey players see before they die

Ask any Maple Leaf to list their top five memories of the past 20 years, and every single one will include the Clark-McSorley fight from the 1993 playoffs. Even non-Leaf fans know the scene by heart: Clark looking over his shoulder at a fallen Doug Gilmour, then without hesitation dropping his gloves and heading directly for the twice-his-size McSorley and rocking him with a right handed haymaker that highlighted one of the best fights in NHL history, with the whole thing called perfectly by Bob Cole ("Oh! Clark is nailing McSorley!").

Every Leaf fan has this sequence memorized. But over time, many have forgotten the comedy gold that came in the immediate aftermath. And that's where I come in.

Today's great obscure moment in Leafs history is: Everything that happened immediately after the Clark-McSorley fight

The Todd Gill vs. Dave Taylor fight

Three things that make me laugh about this fight.

1.) Bob Cole is completely oblivious to it. He doesn't even notice it until after Clark and McSorley are off the ice.

2.) Remember a guy named Dave Taylor who played on the Triple Crown line with Dionne and Simmer in the late 70s? It's the same guy. The night of this fight, Taylor was 56 years old.

3.) The cameras only catch a few seconds of the entire fight, and even then only because they happen to skate by in the background of the main event. What happened in this fight? Who won? Was it any good? Does anyone have grainy handycam footage we could analyze? Can we run some kind of computer simulation to find out what happened?

Gilmour goes after the Kings bench

When I say "goes after", I mean it in the patented Doug Gilmour "look like you want to fight while staying out of reach" way. This may be the least enthusiastic bench confrontation in history, since Gilmour doesn't want to fight, Anderson and Ellett don't know how to fight, and the Kings players are all too busy trying not to make eye contact with Wendel as he skates by so that he doesn't kill them.

Everybody who will somedy
club a guy over the head with a
stick,raise your hand

McSorley goes Sean Penn on the cameraman

On his way off the ice, McSorley decides that he doesn't want anybody to film him. This seems like an odd choice for a professional athlete during a televised sporting event, but in his defence, you wouldn't want to have your picture taken either if Wendel Clark had just punched your left eyeball three inches into your brain.

Also, McSorley is naked from the waist up at this point. Don't ask.

Barry Melrose's mullet

Technically, this wasn't specific to this particular moment, but it still deserves a mention.

We all agree that any shot of Barry Melrose from the early 90s is guaranteed amusement. But the shots of him during this game are made even better by the bright pink Gummi Bears sign directly behind him. Not even Melrose's smoldering mulletude could look cool in front of that sign. It was close, though.

Somebody throws a crutch on the ice

Any loser can toss a cup of soda or a bag of popcorn on the ice. The really hardcore will throw coins or batteries. But you have to be a special kind of crazy to throw a crutch.

Here's my question: did somebody get so worked up that they forgot they couldn't walk and threw their own crutch on the ice? Or did somebody else steal a crutch for a handicapped person and fire it over the glass? I can't even decide which scenario would be funnier. (Yes I can: the second one.)

In either case, how did the crutch's owner get home? Can we even be sure that he did? Is it possible that there's still an angry fan hopping in circles around Maple Leaf Gardens and wondering how the series turned out?

The Gill-Taylor fight ends

That's right, during everything mentioned above, the Gill-Taylor fight is still going on. The John Ferguson Jr era was shorter than this fight. Did I mention that Dave Taylor was 68 years old? Halfway through this fight he retired from hockey and had a rink in his hometown named after him during a quiet ceremony that was marred by the fact the Gill was still hitting him.

Pat Burns charges the Kings bench

This is probably the most memorable post-fight moment. Burns is jawing and pointing at the Kings bench, then suddenly makes a break for it before being restrained by a policeman, various ushers, and a guy in a yellow jacket who appears to be the bass player from Def Leppard.

Clearly, Burns had no intention of actually attacking anyone. This was one of those "fire up the crowd" moments, which would be fine except that 90% of the crowd didn't notice because they were looking somewhere else. They couldn't watch it on the scoreboard either, since back then the Maple Leaf Gardens scoreboard had four colors, sixteen pixels and could only show the word "Noise" and strange images of Mickey Mouse hands clapping.

Pinky finger

The guy in the pink shirt giving the Kings bench the finger

Just as Burns gives up his half-hearted charge, a random fan in a pink golf shirt and what appear to be acid-wash jeans strikes a mighty archer pose and flips off the Kings bench for about half a second before realizing he's on TV and switching to polite applause.

I love this guy. Some day I'm going to track him down and get a picture of him giving me the finger. Seriously, if anyone knows who he is, let me know.

When Nikolai Borschevsky gets his own talk show, I want this guy to be his sidekick. I want him to sit on the couch in his Zack Morris outfit while Borschevsky asks rambling questions, and then furiously flip off the confused guest as we cut to commercial. Make it happen, CBC!

The video evidence

Thanks to the wonders of Youtube, here's the entire sequence. Enjoy...