The end has arrived

The end, finally, as arrived. In less than three weeks, the Kings have gone from Kansas City to Denver to home (briefly) to Anaheim to Las Vegas to Hamburg to Stockholm to Berlin to Annapolis to Newark to Philadelphia. I counted, and over an 18-night span I slept in 11 different places, if you include the airplane and a friend’s couch. Everybody is excited about going home, but for the players, there’s a rub there. The coaching staff wants the players’ focus to be on tonight’s game, and not on the postgame flight back to Los Angeles, something Terry Murray addressed yesterday…

MURRAY: “When I pulled the team together on the ice at the end of (Friday’s) practice, that was the message. I complimented the guys. I think they’ve done an incredible job, through the end of the exhibition season with five games in seven days, then moving through the European part of it. There was a lot of movement. They’ve handled it very well emotionally. We just need to pull it together after a game that we were in and out of. We ended up chasing the game, at the end of the night, and that’s not the way you want to do it but we’ll regroup and play a big game.’’