Facing the Flames

Before I head out to the morning skate, and hopefully learn the new line combinations… If you missed yesterday’s news, you can catch up here with my LAKings.com notebook. Thanks for reading…

Tonight’s opponent, Calgary, is familiar and is only going to get more familiar. The Kings and Flames have already met once this season, a 5-2 Calgary win on Nov. 21. After tonight, they play again on Dec. 17 in Calgary and then again on Dec. 30 in Calgary. In one of those scheduling quirks, the Kings and Flames will be done with each other after that. The Kings will look for a better effort against Calgary than their last one, a game in which Jarome Iginla scored 13 seconds into the game and went on to record a hat trick.

Here’s what Terry Murray said about facing the Flames again…

MURRAY: “They’re a good hockey club. Their back end is as good as anybody in the league. Their goaltending is first-rate and they have Iginla, who is a world-class guy who scored three on us here at home. They play hard. They’re playing a very intense game, like they did last year against us.

“They played hard in every one of those four games, so we need to bring that game that I’ve been talking about, which is our best, in order to give ourselves a chance to win at the end of the day. They’re a very strong counter-attack team, with their defensemen joining, and we’ve got to have a checking mentality again.”