The view from Phoenix

The Kings didn’t move into the top eight of the Western Conference last night — that wasn’t possible — but they did move into a virtual tie for ninth place with Phoenix, one point behind Nashville. It’s still a little early in the season to call a loss “devastating,” but a loss to the Coyotes, at home, coming off the holiday break — and against a team that had to travel the morning of the game and had injury woes — would have put the Kings four points behind Phoenix. That might have felt, well, sort of devastating. So, the Kings will take small victories where they can find them. There was no Arizona-based coverage of last night’s game, so here are some postgame quotes from the Coyotes’ locker room…

COACH DAVE TIPPETT
(on the game…) “I thought we hung in there. We wanted to make sure we competed hard and give ourselves the best chance of winning. We were hanging around the whole game right to the end. There were a couple of goals that LaBarbera would like to have back, but those are tough to overcome.”

(on McElhinney’s relief effort…) “I thought he played very well. He made a couple good saves and then he got lucky on a couple posts, so we just took a chance to see if we could change the momentum there. We competed hard tonight and you always want results, without a doubt. They had some guys really play well tonight. We have to keep that attitude and try to win a big game at home.”

(on Raffi Torres’ goals…) “He made a couple good plays on breakaways to score. With our lineup the way it is, we need people to contribute throughout, and he gave us a couple good goals tonight.”

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SHANE DOAN
(on the game…) “Everyone has injuries, everyone has people that they are missing. You have to find ways to battle through it and make sure that other guys step up. I thought Raffi Torres was great and (Patrick) O’Sullivan. That line was really good for us. We had guys step up. We’ve just got to find ways to score on the power play. Special teams this year are huge for us and we’ve got to be better at it.”

(on the Kings’ defensemen scoring goals…) “Their blue line is huge for them. They were getting a lot of shots through to the net and they were shooting a lot of pucks through. Their guys were going to the net hard.”