Murray has high hopes for Ponikarovsky

It’s been a season of fits and starts for Alexei Ponikarovsky, who played 13 games, then missed 12 games with a broken finger, then played nine games, then missed six games with an ankle injury. Ponikarovsky has three goals and four assists in 22 games, mostly in a third-line role, but tonight will return to the lineup in a first-line role alongside center Anze Kopitar and right winger Dustin Brown. After today’s morning skate, I asked Terry Murray about what his expectations were for Ponikarovsky’s first game back…

MURRAY: “The expectations are pretty high, quite honestly. He’s been through a lot of hard skating. His conditioning is really good. I think he’s sharp. So I’m looking for him to be a player who is going to use his size more consistently, to be a shooter more than he has been. I have expectations, as we talked about when we got him this summer, to be a scorer, to put some numbers up on the goal-production side of things. Also, we’re looking for him to be a special-teams player. He was killing penalties at a pretty good level before the injury, so we want to get him back into that, and we want to get him onto the power play because of the size that he has. Get him in front of the net. We think he’s a pretty well-rounded player. It just comes down to getting to that level every day, and pushing yourself to that level every game.”