On Anze Kopitar’s progress:
He’s skating really good. We’ll see how he feels tomorrow. He’s day-to-day.
On Drew Doughty’s denial of an odd-man rush Sunday in Anaheim:
Most odd-man rushes against come after a turnover or after a great scoring chance. If you don’t score, then there’s a chance it’s going the other way, and if you’re turning the puck over, there’s a chance you’re getting an odd-man against. Players are pretty well schooled. It’s not specific to one player in terms of how to defend a one-man rush.
On Derek Forbort’s progress:
I think what we’re trying to make progress with Derek in is his consistency shift-to-shift – who he’s on the ice with, killing penalties, his puck management, puck decisions – things like that. You give those guys a little bit in terms of experience or composure or things like that that you also want to make sure that the intensity and the compete part has to be in that A-plus area. The other stuff we can give a little bit, but not that. So those are areas we clearly need when you say ‘improvement in’ or ‘that you’ve seen improvement in,’ those are areas where we’ve seen improvement, there are areas also where we need improvement. [Reporter: You’ve increased his minutes pretty dramatically.] McNabb got hurt, Forbort went in, and Greener and Gibby, if we’re relatively healthy, as I’ve said, it’s not a surprise or anything like that. They’re probably bot not going to be in the lineup if we’re fully healthy, so that means there’s two rookies in the lineup.
On how he’d evaluate Dustin Brown’s game:
You evaluate it. You know what? You guys keep talking about Brownie. Brownie’s got a great attitude and he’s working really hard. You evaluate after 20 games. That’s what you do always with data and statistics, so you do it.
On the reduced schedule in the coming weeks:
It’s the only part of our schedule – the next three weeks – that it does for the whole season. [Reporter: How do you approach these two games in eight days? It’s good rest for the players, I would imagine?] Actually, it’s seven in 21, is actually the way I’m looking at it, and because we primarily have the away games – Arizona-San Jose, those are the two – so there are two division games, so those are big games. There’s a back-to-back coming up, which are always important and always tough, so we’ll take a little bit of what we’ve just accomplished. We won back-to-back division games this last week – Edmonton-Anaheim – with the back-to-back in there, so we’re just going to take those things and say we’re a good team and keep going.
Rules for Blog Commenting
Repeated violations of the blog rules will result in site bans, commensurate with the nature and number of offenses.
Please flag any comments that violate the site rules for moderation. For immediate problems regarding problematic posts, please email zdooley@lakings.com.