The view from Phoenix

The Kings and Phoenix Coyotes split their two-game, home-and-home series, with the Coyotes winning Thursday and the Kings winning Saturday. The teams won’t meet again until March 3 at Staples Center. Here’s how last night’s Kings-Coyotes game was presented in the Arizona Republic, followed by some additional postgame quotes from the Coyotes’ locker room…

Los Angeles Kings get revenge, beat Phoenix Coyotes 4-3

Awful first period dooms Phoenix Coyotes in loss

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COACH DAVE TIPPETT
(on the physical presence brought from Paul Bissonnette…) “We needed that. We needed some push back. We were light on our sticks early. We were getting out battled in too many situations and Biz jumped in and did a heck of a job. I think he had seven or eight hits after two periods.”

(on his message to the team during first intermission…) “We’ve got to get in the battles here; we’re too far away from the battles. We’re two stick lengths, when you’ve got to be right on top of the battle. We weren’t hard enough on the puck, we weren’t advancing the puck. They were owning us down low in our own zone. They were hard around our net. If you look at the first game against them, the other night, we moved the puck very well, we were quick around our net and didn’t have a lot of trouble around there. Tonight they had a purpose to get there, and we fed their fire a little bit by turning pucks over and letting them get there.”

(on losing the opportunity to separate from the Kings in the standings…) “That was an opportunity to put L.A. 10 (points) back of us and unfortunately it didn’t happen. That’s the way it’s going to be. We said the same thing about Columbus in here last week. We played them twice in a week and we had the same message. We’ve got to find ways to separate ourselves.”

LEE STEMPNIAK
(on how they were able to get back into the game…) “I think we just started to relax. We’ve got a pretty smart group of guys and we just kind of took a step back and relaxed, realized that we weren’t doing anything right. We were able to get on the body and a lot of that was guys like Biz [Paul Bissonnette] and Doaner [Shane Doan], but a lot of guys were throwing the body around and I think it gave us some energy and got us back in the game.”

(on getting more scoring chances…) “I think the biggest thing is to keep that belief that pucks are going to go in, and you just want to get shots. I got lucky on the first one obviously. I was just in front and it went off my hand. The second one was just a good play by (Taylor) Pyatt. He drove the defensemen down a little bit and gave me the puck right in the slot and I just tried to use the D-man as a screen.”

KEITH YANDLE
(on having some rest time coming up…) “I think we’re going to get a rest day maybe, have a good day of practice and then play a game. Then I think it’s a couple games and then break and time to rest. I think, before the break, we’ve just got to play hard, get our rest when we can and play good solid hockey.”

(on how it affects the team mentally when they fall behind early…) “I think it shows good character in our team, missing guys like Jovo [Ed Jovanovski] and Mo [Derek Morris] and being able to come back and play like that and tie it up at one point. Obviously we didn’t get the outcome we wanted, but I think it did show good character in our team to come back, down three.”

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