On whether Dustin Penner will re-enter the lineup:
“Yep.”
On Penner recapturing his chemistry with Mike Richards and Jeff Carter:
“His last shift was in this building. I hope he still remembers that.”
On Brad Richardson scoring in “this building”:
“He should remember that, too. If it’s your last one and your first one, you should remember it.”
On whether he expects a “desperate” Dallas Stars performance:
“I expect them to be back home, and they’re coming off a win in Anaheim and a win in San Jose. I expect them to recreate that again. I’m not sure what the adverb is. ‘Desperate’ is when you get your heels on the cliff.”
On how the Kings forced a lot of turnovers in the previous Dallas game:
“Well, that’s the game we try and play every night. So it’s not like we try and do something different. I mean, they have a mobile defense that moves pucks for them, quite honest, and if we can get on top of them and put pucks in good places, it’s not about forcing the turnovers. It’s just having possession of the puck.”
On any different approach to playing Dallas with Jaromir Jagr and Brenden Morrow gone:
“Well, the boy they put on right wing (Alex Chiasson) with Benn is a young Brenden Morrow, so knock off 10 years and say that’s Brenden Morrow, OK? Jagr – as great of a player as he is, he’s a difficult guy to play with. If you look at Dallas’ team, they’re similar to us in that you have a lot of forwards that play in straight lines and work hard, and that’s what these young guys are doing for them. It’s really similar to us. These guys that they put in their lineup are no different than Clifford, King, Nolan, Lewis. They’re pretty important players for us. I know it’s natural for everybody to get caught in it – and me too – talking about Jaromir Jagr and guys like that. But they are 40 years old, and it is a young man’s league.”
On whether he’s “happy” with the team’s first periods:
“You know, I don’t really have anything that I’m unhappy with all year, other than individual, game-to-game stuff. There’s a reason we are where we are. They set the clock at 20, and you have to be ready at 20. When it stops at zero and you come in, you get 15 to 21 minutes depending on what’s going on, and then you’re ready again. And that’s another start. So you break it down into seven minutes of ice time to 26 minutes, and we expect quality performance. That’s what good teams do. And when you don’t get that, then you usually are close enough to lose by one or two. And teams that aren’t good teams lose by two-or-three or three-or-four. It’s a fine line between winning and losing.”
On whether the goals-per-period stat indicates L.A.’s strength as the game progresses:
“I don’t really know how to even look at it, because I don’t base it on that. Those stats don’t meaning nothing to me. Really, they’re irrelevant stats because if that was the most important stat, then why isn’t playing with the lead the most important stat?…Again, it’s not based on the goals. It’s not based on ‘good starts because you scored the first goal’. That’s got nothing to do with it. [A good start is based on] how your team plays. How you feel inside the locker room, how you play. It’s like playing Anaheim the last game we came off – I think it was the best game we played in our last 10. But when everybody who tells us what we think we know or don’t know, they go ‘Well, jeez, you guys lost in a shootout.’ That’s not really how we played. So if we can bring that same game that we played last game into tonight, then we have a chance to win.”
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