Good break or bad break?

It’s hard to know what to make of this 16-day break for the Kings, and in all reality, we won’t know until at least a week after it ends. On the positive side, it’s never a bad thing for players to get a rest during the season, particularly with a tough playoff stretch run upcoming. On the negative side, the Kings didn’t respond well to their previous long break. They had eight days off in late December, and they came back with a three-game losing streak. It’s not uncommon for teams to struggle after breaks. This difference, as Terry Murray has pointed out recently, is that every team is taking a break right now, not just the Kings. Here’s what Murray said about the break…

MURRAY: “It’s one of those breaks that you would rather not have, an Olympic break. Two weeks, it’s a very unusual thing to have happen. I know we’ve gone through it before, but to close everything down completely, with a critical part of the season coming up, is going to make it more difficult for everybody. You’ve got to come back and hit the ground running again. The momentum you maybe had built up is not there now, and you have to find it. So it doesn’t make it easy, that is for sure, but the other side of it, too, is everybody is going through the same issue, so we just have to work with what we’ve got.

“It’s nice to have a little bit of a lull in your schedule, just in your regular schedule. There’s times when you have those three-day breaks, and you can give your team a couple days off at this time of the year, and they come back and practice and play again. That would be nice, to be able to work with that kind of schedule, but this is two weeks. It’s a long time.”