Puck skills a strength for Doughty

Drew Doughty’s offensive numbers have picked up of late — he has two goals in his last three games and four goals in his last seven games — and as part of that, Doughty has appeared to be more aggressive with the puck in both ends of the ice, either skating it out of his own zone or taking it deep into the offensive zone (or sometimes both). Doughty typically excels when handling the puck and is particularly good at maintaining control in traffic, and after practice today, Terry Murray was asked whether the coaches had been encouraging Doughty to play more with the puck…

MURRAY: “We’re always pushing that part of the game. He’s one of the best in the game at it. We want to have the puck on his stick a lot, whether it’s in transition or carrying the puck out of the hot kitchen in the D-zone to calm things down or get an attack going. There’s times that we’re seeing where it’s important to get things turned around, get something going in the offensive zone. As we’ve seen, at times on this road trip, he grabs the puck and gets on the attack. He’s a dangerous player. There’s a lot of things that can happen. He can score himself. He’s got great vision to make plays. So we’ve always encouraged that, quite frankly, with Doughty. The more he has the puck on his stick, the better I feel about it, because you are seeing good decisions being made and you are seeing a player who can be a real threat on the offensive part of the game.”

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