`Get out of here’

Perhaps you heard, but the Kings failed on a 5-on-3 advantage last night. It’s been a pretty well-kept secret… Last night, Terry Murray’s comments on the power play were mostly compliments toward the Wild’s penalty killers, but today he gave a more detailed breakdown on what he feels has been going wrong with the Kings’ two-man advantages this season and, in particular, his advice for Drew Doughty…

MURRAY: “When you’re out there playing on a 5-on-3, there’s options that you, as a player, have to read and adjust to yourselves. You go from an umbrella to a box. You’re kind of moving things around with that attitude, so that penalty killers have to read off of you and, hopefully, some seams, lanes, people open up. I look at the one power play, the 5-on-3 when we had the full two minutes, we had some great opportunities. Brownie has two open nets on the backdoor and the puck bounced over his stick, exploded off his stick. He couldn’t recover with the loose puck bouncing around. There were some good attempts. We don’t get shots through. I give Zanon credit, because he blocked three, I think, on Stoll that were one-timers. The penalty kill is over, and he’s lying on his back in the crease saying, `Thank God.’ He was exhausted and he was hurt. So you’ve got to give those guys a lot of credit for doing what they did. It was tremendous.

“The other part, though, that ends up developing on that 5-on-3 is that Doughty ends up on the left defense and Stoll ends up as that quarterback, on the right. I don’t like that, and it bothers me whenever it happens. And it happened recently and it was addressed, and it happened again last night at a critical point in the game. Doughty is the guy we want to have with the puck. He’s got nine power-play goals. He’s Weber for Nashville. He’s a shooter, he can put points up, he can score, he sees the ice very well. As a young guy, I want him to take ownership and say, `Get out of here, that’s my place,’ that kind of an attitude. Put people in positions, slow it down. Hold onto the puck, and rotate back over top. I think that gives you a better opportunity at the end of the day.”