How to Be Patient without Compromising Your Expectations: A Trip Back to 2006

Some of y'all have been around the block a time or two

The (blurry) view from glass seats at Staples Center in 2006

It is April 1, 2006. I’m finishing my sophomore year of college in Los Angeles, and my older brother tells me some good news: the Kings have a promotion that allows college students to get premium seats at an exceptional discount.

As I recall, we got glass seats just to the right of the penalty boxes for something like 60 bucks a pop. Even granting that this was 20(!) years ago, it still felt like a great deal. Seeing any hockey game from the front row is an experience everyone should have if they ever get the opportunity, and doing so in a game between two division rivals with the Stars in first place? Well, that seemed like the perfect way to wrap up the first season after the lockout, particularly for a poor college student like myself.

These were, after all, the first-place Dallas Stars, the same club sitting on 49 wins and 102 points with nine games left to play.

NHL Standings as of 3/31/06

For context, the Stars’ .699 points percentage at that time was better than the West-winning Stars of 2024, that team of the 113-point season. The 2005-06 Stars were known for being shootout fiends, sure; they were also a really, really good team.

(I talked with Jussi Jokinen in Finland a couple years ago about those shootouts and many other things, if you’d like to revisit that piece here.)

Jussi Jokinen Is Taking Another Shot

Anyway, here John and I were in Los Angeles, and we were pumped to watch the Stars up close after viewing a barn-burner in Anaheim the night before that ended in an uncharacteristic shootout loss, with the Ducks taking a 5-4 win. Andy MacDonald had scored a goal to tie the game up with less than three minutes remaining in the third, and Marty Turco had let in the first two shots of the skills competition while Jokinen and Antti Miettinen went 0-for-2.

It was a bummer of a game, but I recall us talking at the time about how at least we saved the good tickets for the Kings game, which would surely have a better result than the shootout loss to the Ducks. Surely!