Fourth line earns coach’s confidence

The Kings, once again, will go with a fourth-line look of Trevor Lewis centering Brad Richardson and Kevin Westgarth tonight. Terry Murray said Alexei Ponikarovsky, out with a lower-body injury, is “still a little lame. … He’s not able to cross over, pivot, open up, all those things that hockey players have to do.” Still, Murray said he feels confident in what the fourth line is able to do. Richardson and Westgarth, for the most part, are known quantities, but Lewis seems to be increasingly reliable at both ends, and has earned some penalty-kill time of late. Here’s what Murray had to say about the trio today…

MURRAY: “The fourth line has given me a lot of confidence to play them. They’re doing the right things. They’re playing hard. They’re playing with speed, with grit, attacking, scoring goals. There was a huge goal against San Jose. So they’re giving me everything that I could possibly want from them. To be able to come out of a special-teams situation and put the fourth line out there, and know that they’re going to get matched up against one of the better lines on the opposition, and that they’re checking the right way and playing on the right side of the puck, is a real good thing for the hockey club. It obviously backs off some of your top guys, in a heavy schedule like this. Through it all, you’re going to be fresher and play at a higher tempo because of it.”