January 28 morning skate quotes: Drew Doughty

On Monday’s game appearing to be a “vintage Kings win”:
Yeah, that’s how we win games. We don’t give up goals and we don’t score many goals, but we’re fine with that. We don’t want to be a high-scoring team where it’s just a crapshoot out there every night – just running around trying to get goals. We want to have solid defensive game and we need our offense to pick up too, but a lot of it has to come from the power play. The power play was probably the only thing that we would like to fix from last night. We had some good opportunities and some bad ones too. We’re happy with the win and we’ll take those every day.

On limiting San Jose’s top players:
We play them so much, we know what they’re going to do. If you can shut down those top two lines, you’re going to do pretty well. If you can keep them off the power play and not take many penalties, that’s where they get a lot of their momentum from – especially in the first 10 minutes that’s always the toughest to play San Jose. It seems like every time we go into San Jose, they get one in the first 10 minutes and we’re on our heels right off the bat. So we managed to not let them do that last night and we gave them nine shots and that’s great defensive game right there.

On whether the team had talked about blocking shots before the game:
Blocking is never really talked about, unless you’re on the PK. It’s just known that if you can block a shot you better block it. We don’t want guys dodging shots or flamingo-ing or whatever you call it. It’s important. We’re trying to win games as a team and that’s what it takes – all those little things. People don’t realize those things – like little checks on big players and blocking shots and good sticks in certain positions – and those things sometimes make the difference in the game.

On aspects of the game the team focused on in needing a win:
We just needed that. If everyone on the team outplayed the other guy looking across from them, we could win that game. That’s all our mindset was before the game, so do that.

On Phoenix’s mobile defense, and what Los Angeles has to be aware of tonight:
Yeah, they’re different than they have [been] every year I’ve been in the league. Every year I’ve been in the league, they’ve been the team that has the lowest goals against, and not scoring many goals. And this year, they’re completely opposite. They almost flip flopped. They’re high in goal scoring and low in goals against. They’re lighting a lot more. So we don’t want to get in a race with them tonight. We want to play our game – a solid road game, a game we know how to play. Keep the score down and win it that way.

On what needs to be fixed on the power play:
I don’t know. I think tonight we’re just going to try to get more shots. I’m just going to load up for that one-timer, that little wrister through. Last night I don’t think I had any shots on the power play. So I think that’s what we need to do – simplify, get shots to the net. Our power play was good a few games ago and scored us some big goals. So we just have to remember what we did there and do it again.

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