Friends, family and baseball

With no game again until Sunday afternoon, the players and coaches for both teams have a bit of down time when they’re not practicing and meeting. Darryl Sutter has four friends in town from Alberta, so if you see five farmers/oilmen walking around the South Bay, given them a shout. Sutter said the pals are longtime friends who have all been in each other’s weddings, but their arrival in Los Angeles wasn’t a surprise trip. “They didn’t surprise me,’’ Sutter said, “because they phoned for tickets.’’

Also, if you’re at Angels Stadium tonight and see a young man with a Toronto Blue Jays hat and a patchy beard, say hello to Drew Doughty, who is a big Jays fan and will be in attendance. Doughty was asked about how he manages his free time during the heat of the playoffs…

DOUGHTY: “I’m thinking about hockey all the time. Even if I don’t want to be thinking about it, I’m thinking about it, just because playoff hockey is so much fun and it’s a great time. People have families in town, and stuff like that. Some others just go out and see a ballgame or whatever. The Jays are in town right now. So it’s easy to just kind of get away, but like I said, you’re always thinking about it, no matter what. You can’t even sleep at night, because you’re just thinking about the next game.’’

The Kings are in an unusual situation this weekend. Not only do they have a noon start on Sunday, but they don’t know what will happen that night. If the Kings win, they will go home. If they lose, they will fly to St. Louis on Sunday night in preparation for Game 5 on Tuesday. For any number of reasons, the Kings don’t want it to come to that, so they’ll look for another strong home game. Doughty talked about the increasing support the Kings are receiving around town…

DOUGHTY: “The crowd, throughout the whole playoffs, has been unbelievable. I know everyone is behind us right now. When I first came to this city, nobody was recognizing you on the street or talking about Kings hockey. Now, you’re going for lunch or dinner, whatever it might be, and everyone is talking about it. It’s huge, and we want to take this as far as we can and obviously win the Cup. But we can’t get too high on ourselves. We just have to take it one game at a time.’’