March 12 afternoon quotes: Darryl Sutter

The Kings did not hold a morning skate on Tuesday, opting instead for meetings within the team hotel. Darryl Sutter spoke with the traveling media at 1:30 pm.

On whether Tyler Toffoli might play tonight:
“Not planning on it, no.”

On whether he’s planning on any lineup changes:
“I can’t tell you that. Back to back, put guys in warmup, right? Check on a couple of banged up guys, see how they are and go from there.”

On watching Jake Muzzin begin to put the pieces together:
“He’s got a lot of pieces to put together. Quite honest, he struggled the last two games from the red line back to the goalie, so he’s got to clean that up. Quite honest, with players like that, we’ve been able to hide them during home games because of who they’re on the ice against. We need a little better focus in terms of the 200-foot part of it. Don’t get too caught up in [it]. The biggest difference between playing in the American League and the National Hockey League is…you’re out on the ice against somebody who’s really good.”

On so few power play opportunities:
“I was teasing guys this morning about it in the meeting. ‘I’m afraid I can’t even give you guys hell.’ I said, ‘It only takes you 30 seconds to score.’”

On the impressive movement on the power play:
“Well, they’re identical plays, both of them – right? We’re trying to get Brown to be a net presence, and quite honest, that’s an area that Muzzin – probably the biggest area that he’s helped us is just the power play. Just take his power play minutes, it’s made a big difference because of his ability to do what we want him to do on it. It gives Slava a little bit more room to operate, and we basically put Muzzin and Slava – given them the priority of it. The last two games…they both had identical roles…But it’s the end result of what we tried to do before that, and it was mostly because of Muzzin and the other side of the ice. There are only eight games out of 24 where we’ve gotten more power plays than the other team, and that, to me, is sort of frustrating.”

On the heavy divisional schedule:
“We’ve tried to approach this one, just because it’s back-to-back again. When you look at our next five games, if you do it like that, we’ve got these guys three times and San Jose twice. You know what, we’re looking at it like back-to-back…I tell the players I’m not interested in talking about it. That’s your guys’ jobs. I’m talking about results. How bad we played or how good we played, I’m not interested in that. Results take care of themselves, and trying to get players to be better individually. That’s what we’re trying to do, and if we can get that out of [them] and continue to get our top guys to be a little better players for us – it’s like last week, talking about goalies, this week, talking about somebody who’s a first star. That doesn’t help us unless we’re getting better individually. That’s what we’re trying to work on.”

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