The Kings’ (somewhat) magic number: 65

After practice today, the question came up about the Kings generating more shots and scoring chances. Ultimately, wins and losses are all that matter. For instance, within the last couple weeks, the Kings had 18 shots on goal in a victory over Phoenix and 39 shots on goal in a loss to Detroit. That said, it’s obvious that putting more pucks toward the net gives a team a better chance of scoring, and the Kings have set, as their goal, a total of 65 shots toward the net in every game. That includes shots on goal, blocked shots and wide shots, basically any attempt to get the puck to the net. Last night in Columbus, that total was 44 (22 shots on goal, 13 shots blocked and nine shots that missed the net). Today, Terry Murray talked about the need to raise that number.

MURRAY: “That was a big part of the conversation we had in our pregame talk last night. When you go back and compare the last two five-game segments, there was a drop-off of 16 shots attempted in this five-game segment, as opposed to the last five. That’s a tremendous number, in my mind, and it just becomes an attitude. You’ve got to get into a shooting position. You’ve got to have those shot attempts. You’ve got to have that mentality that you’re going to get pucks to the net on a consistent basis. When you start looking at making that extra pass, extra play, it ends up coming back the other way at you most of the time. So we just keep talking about it. I liked our attitude last night. I thought, in the Columbus game, we had more pucks going toward the net. There was some good net presence, and we’ve just got to keep building on it.”