Lockout

It had appeared as though the entire Kings team would be back for the lockout-shortened season. Until Sunday morning. The Stanley Cup champion Kings traded popular enforcer Kevin Westgarth to the Carolina Hurricanes for forward Anthony Stewart. Additionally, the Kings will receive a fourth-round draft pick in 2013 and a sixth-rounder in 2014. The move made sense on multiple levels.  Westgarth, who was the Kings' player representative and a key figure in collective bargaining agreement talks, lives in Raleigh, N.C., during the off-season.

The seven-month hockey holding pattern lifted and the Kings were free, free at last, to start that thing known as a title defense. Liftoff was Sunday morning with the opening session of an abbreviated training camp at El Segundo, and everything going forward will be taking place on an accelerated basis. "If it takes 48 games to get to our stride, that's all it will be, 48 games," Kings Coach Darryl Sutter said. He did get off a good line about the first day. "Tough on old guys, putting your skates back on," Sutter said.

There was almost an anticlimatic air about the official end of the NHL's lockout. It started Sept. 15 and ended Saturday night when the memorandum of understanding was completed. That final step took much longer than expected -- symbolic of the long and painful labor struggle between the NHL and the players association. An NHL PR operative tweeted at about 7:20 p.m. (Pacific time) #hockeyisback, signaling that the memorandum of understanding had been signed. And thus, NHL hockey was back in business with teams free to start signing players and making trades, at 9 p.m. (Pacific)

The only current NHL head coach with experience at guiding a team through a lockout-shortened, 48-game season has a good idea of what to expect if all goes as anticipated and teams open training camps Sunday in advance of a Jan. 19 return from lockout limbo. "We're all going to come up with ideas but you really don't have time to work on a lot of things," said Kings Coach Darryl Sutter, who coached the Chicago Blackhawks during the truncated 1994-95 season. "We're lucky we have our team returning, other than banged-up guys.

The only current NHL head coach with experience at guiding a team through a lockout-shortened, 48-game season has a good idea of what to expect if all goes as anticipated and teams open training camps Sunday in advance of a Jan. 19 return from lockout limbo. "We're all going to come up with ideas but you really don't have time to work on a lot of things," said Kings Coach Darryl Sutter, who coached the Chicago Blackhawks during the truncated 1994-95 season. "We're lucky we have our team returning, other than banged-up guys.

As the clock ticks hurriedly to NHL's opening day on Jan. 19, the Ducks gathered Thursday at Honda Center for an informal practice to gauge their conditioning before the 48-game sprint in this lockout-shortened season. "From what I saw, the guys have taken care of themselves and I think we'll be ready to go," said left wing Matt Beleskey, who spent three months of the layoff playing for the Coventry Blaze in England - the team covering his expenses, the left wing funding hisinsurance.

The NHL's Board of Governors gave unanimous approval Wednesday to the collective bargaining agreement it had tentatively reached with the players' association. The next step will be for players to ratify the deal. That electronic voting process is expected to begin on Friday and conclude on Saturday, with players also approving the deal. That would allow the NHL to officially end the lockout and permit training camps to open on Sunday. As soon as the lockout is officially lifted, the league is set to release a full regular-season schedule in which each team will play 48 games within their respective conferences.

The lockout giveth, and the lockout (almost) taketh. April 7, 2012. In Calgary. An otherwise meaningless game between the Flames and Ducks, two teams with nothing on the line. That could have been it, the career finale for one of the league's incandescent stars, future Hall of Fame member Teemu Selanne. Cooler heads and one dogged federal mediator pulled the NHL season back from the brink Sunday, meaning Selanne will have the chance for a happier ending to his career. "It came into my mind it could be my last," Selanne said Monday about that April game.

The NHL's lockout of players is likely to drag on until this weekend, after the collective bargaining agreement they tentatively forged early Sunday is completed, reviewed and ratified. But a lock that was open Monday at the Kings' El Segundo practice facility symbolized the beginning of a return to hockey normalcy. The door leading to their locker room was no longer deadbolted, giving players entry to dress and shower in luxury. Lockout rules had banished them to a cramped public locker room when they had rented ice for informal workouts, but those rules have been relaxed.