N.H.L. Playoffs - Kings" Rise Does Not Erase Their Outsiders" Past - NYTimes.com The history of the Los Angeles Kings (1967 to present) is a tragedy in five acts. Or, is it more like 10 installments of an obscure mini-series? The longer you've been a Kings fan, the more analogies you tend to reach for, with brief, weightless pauses for singular playoff success (read that literally) and, of course, the False God Whose Name Is Gretzky period. Steve Babineau/NHLI, via Getty Images Rogie Vachon was the Kings" franchise player when Wayne Gretzky was still playing youth hockey. To come of age as a Kings fan in the late 1970s and "80s was to find oneself wandering all over the Southern California radio dial to hear their games. For two seasons they were on a Christian station. "It was really weird because the program leading up to our Kings pregame show would finish with a hymn or the words "Praise God," and then you would immediately hear the theme song for Kings hockey," Bob Miller, the Kings" longtime play-by-play announcer, recalled in an e-mail. Prayer did help. The Kings" superb play, which has carried them to the franchise's second Stanley Cup finals, has come flecked with reminders (call them insults) of the team's outsider status in the Los Angeles sports landscape. Logo confusion on newscasts prompted the Kings" public-relations department to release a tongue-in-cheek infographic to prevent the local news media from reporting that the N.B.A."s Sacramento Kings had won the Stanley Cup. In fairness, the Kings have been guilty of logo abuse for years, and their owner, Philip Anschutz, who is based in Denver, has a global portfolio in sports teams and arenas. It is possible that Anschutz, the owner of the sports and entertainment empire Anschutz Entertainment Group, is excited that his Kings are in the finals, but only intimates would know it. He doesn't seem to like owning the Kings, leaving the cheerleading - and surely now the beaming - to his optimism-spewing president and chief executive, Tim Leiweke. Anschutz and the developer Ed Roski bought the Kings out of bankruptcy in 1995 and escorted them, still hung over from the Wayne Gretzky years, downtown to the Staples Center for the 1999-2000 season. Now that A.E.G. has added the adjoining entertainment zone called L.A. Live, the company is pressing for a nearby football stadium. Perhaps the next logo on the Kings" sweater should be a chessboard, featuring a pawn holding a hockey stick. But the Kings were birthed in 1967 by a Canadian transplant, Jack Kent Cooke, who built the Fabulous Forum in Inglewood for his Lakers and Kings. The Forum became kind of a dive as it aged, but it was a loud dive, even when a third full. A hefty divorce judgment prompted Cooke to sell his toys to Jerry Buss in 1979. That year, Magic Johnson arrived in Los Angeles to introduce Showtime. Being a middle child, I started following the Kings hard. As a sibling of the Lakers in the "80s, the Kings basked in Buss's love in roughly the same way Fredo Corleone shared his father's faith with brother Michael. To the Kings" die-hard followers, the slights of the past don't matter right now. Not so long ago, the Kings were a beige team to watch. The off-season trade that sent two young players, Brayden Schenn and Wayne Simmonds, to Philadelphia for the gritty star Mike Richards had not, as some predicted, vaulted them to elite status in the Western Conference. When the Kings lost Game 82 in overtime to the San Jose Sharks, they puttered into the playoffs as the eighth seed, to face the No. 1 seed, Vancouver, which finished the regular season with the league's best record. They dispatched Vancouver with coldblooded efficiency and took on the aura of a basketball team from a midmajor conference storming the N.C.A.A. tournament, toppling top seeds in its wake. The Kings are the second No. 8 seed to reach the Stanley Cup finals since 1993-94, when the conference-based playoff format began. The Kings enter Game 1 against the sixth-seeded Devils on Wednesday with a 12-2 record in this year's playoffs, having forgotten to lose on the road. They are led by Jonathan Quick, the 26-year-old goaltender from Milford, Conn., who was selected in the third round of the 2005 draft. Quick, whose 1.54 goals-against average leads all goalies in the playoffs, is the team's first true franchise player in net since Rogie Vachon in the mid-1970s. Quick exudes an innocent fearlessness, and he has developed his own style of playing the position, torso low to the ice, legs and arms darting out from all angles like a cartoon octopus's tentacles. Paul Brownfield is a former television critic for The Los Angeles Times.