Be ready, Part 1

Today’s theme, throughout the interviews, is preparation. Because we can micro-analyze all we want — power play, penalty kill, goaltending, whatever — but when Dustin Brown says, after the game, that the Kings didn’t “come out and show up,” that cuts across all players and all scenarios, and nothing is going to improve, consistently, until that gets corrected.

How to correct it? Much easier said than done and, in all honesty, it’s not really even that easy to say. The basic question, as I put to veterans Matt Greene and Michal Handzus and Terry Murray, today, was essentially, how could a team not be prepared for a huge opportunity such as last night’s game? Doesn’t that raise a red flag? And who bears responsibility for avoiding that becoming a trend? We’ll start with Greene, who obviously didn’t play last night but is an alternate captain. I asked him if last night’s game should have been one that the Kings were most prepared for…

GREENE: “You’d think so. You’d think it would be, but obviously if there was an easy solution to it, it wouldn’t be happening. Definitely it’s a question mark. There’s a million things you could say and there’s a million excuses, but at the end of the day, you’re going to be judged on the way you start the next game. There’s nothing I can say right now that’s going to solve the problem. Maybe the guys came out a little flat last night, but it’s tough to comment because I didn’t play. It’s tough for me to say what was going on.”