Leading Off: The New Kings In the end, Los Angeles threw hockey a proper party Monday night. The silver streamers were a classy touch and the Kings fans were more than appropriately raucous for a Stanley Cup-clinching victory over the Devils. The Kings who skated with the Cup over their heads were nothing but completely deserving after a 6-1 scorching, proving all the necessary grit and resilience, proudly representing underdogs everywhere by having accomplished this as a No. 8 seed. The only glitch came when the crowd failed to follow hockey etiquette and boo Commissioner Gary Bettman, at which point you might have noticed Canada collectively rolling its eyes. Amateurs. Canadians can't get too carried away with the Kings" ending a 45-year championship drought, and nor should we. This is roughly equivalent to two years in Montreal time, these things being felt so much more deeply in places where hockey traces circles in the collective imagination, where it is a part of a city's soul. Los Angelenos were not exactly crying into their mojitos after every frustrating season. No, this championship was something entirely different, if still laudable in its own right, capping a sort of magical hockey mystery tour so spectacularly described by Michael Farber on SI.com. It turned hockey on its head for a few months, writes Bill Plaschke in The Los Angeles Times, even made it king in the land of the Lakers. The credit can be passed around liberally because, as Scott Burnside writes on ESPN.com, so many things had to come together for this to happen. Much credit should go to General Manager, Dean Lombardi, who, as Pierre LeBrun writes on ESPN.com, boldly made the moves to put the final huge pieces together: trading for Mike Richards and Jeff Carter, considered damaged goods by the Flyers; signing Rob Scuderi; taking a chance Simon Gagne's career wasn't over; and hiring Darryl Sutter off his cattle ranch in December. It all came together stunningly in the playoffs, as Nicholas Cotsonika writes on Yahoo.com, giving Los Angeles a hockey championship it had little right to expect for 45 years, minus the promising Wayne Gretzky ones. It happened because goalie Jonathan Quick had his breakout year, writes Brian Cazeneuve on SI.com, and forwards Anze Kopitar and Dustin Brown finally had a stage for their talents. Brown was the perfect captain for this unlikely group, utterly charming when he answered a postgame interview question by NBC's often insufferable Pierre McGuire by saying, it's why we play, except he inserted a piece of profanity that NBC could not bleep and should not have wanted to. As the never-insufferable Mike Emrick would have said, "Oh my." On the crushed side of the ice, the Devils were left to ponder what might have been and to face an uncertain future. Goalie Martin Brodeur said he wants to play another season at age 40, writes Rich Chere in The Star-Ledger, whether with the Devils or not. The captain Zach Parise's unrestricted free-agentness is another hurdle, writes Steve Politi in The Star-Ledger. Steve Bernier's future is even more iffy after it was his major boarding penalty against Scuderi that turned Game 6 into a Kings goal-a-thon. The hit will go down in Devils" infamy, writes Tara Sullivan in The Record, but in a way it fit in the flow of N.H.L. karma that the season's final series turned on one player bashing another's head into the boards. Just in case we needed a reminder that these fun and games are coming at a high price the league has yet to truly recognize. And now, the playoff stage is turned over entirely to the N.B.A., whose finals start Tuesday night, as if on cue. The Heat and the Thunder have all the star power the Devils and Kings did not, with LeBron James and Kevin Durant providing every possible contrast imaginable, writes Rick Reilly on ESPN.com. Yes, this is America's sweethearts, led by Durant, against the Galactic Empire, led by James, writes Berry Tramel in The Oklahoman. It isn't entirely that simple, of course, but that will not keep the television types from ramming it down your throats until the final buzzer. If they could digitally tie little black and white capes onto James and Durant, they would. Actually, they probably can. Believe it or not, there are other players involved, and Dave D'Alessandro writes in The Star-Ledger that the diva versus diva matchup isn't James-Durant but Dwyane Wade versus Russell Westbrook. There is also the whole woe-is-Seattle angle, covered by SI.com's Jerry Brewer, and lots of things that might drive you batty, starting with the Heat's clownish public-address announcer, writes Ken Berger on CBSSports.com. But in the end, it will all come down to another referendum on James, whose crucible now moves to the middle of Oklahoma, writes Greg Cote in The Miami Herald, which will sort of make you wish he was just another player and not a human Rorschach test. In that, James will share a slice of the stage this week with another ink blot, Tiger Woods, at the United States Open. It is possible to avoid the all-Tiger, all-the-time theme by reading about why Casey Martin's cart isn't causing an uproar this time around, as Michael Bamberger writes on SI.com, and how a 14-year-old, Andy Zhang, became the youngest ever to make the Open field. While all that happens, Los Angeles will still be celebrating its new Kings, and hockey will be learning to tolerate Los Angeles.