Back on the ice

For those needing to catch up on today’s news and notes, please check out my LAKings.com notebook. Thanks for reading…

Kings notebook (March 2)

In just a couple hours, we’ll find out how the Kings — and the Stars, for that matter — will respond after the two-week Olympic break. Terry Murray has been through this before, as an assistant under Ken Hitchcock with the Philadelphia Flyers in 2006. That season, the Flyers were thriving before the break, but went 0-2-1 in their first three games after the break. The Flyers eventually got back on track and finished fifth in the East. Here’s what Murray remembers from that experience, and how it might apply to the Kings tonight…

MURRAY: “Everybody certainly was refreshed coming back from the Olympics. I think it took — if I remember correctly — it took a couple games to get to that pace that you left the game with. Everybody will be trying to do a lot, and that’s maybe a bit of a dangerous thing sometimes. We just want to make sure we’re doing the right things. Keep the shifts short, keep the energy high and manage the puck the right way. That’s the one thing, as a team, that we’ve really been pushing over the year and a half, is the decisions we make through the middle of the ice. Those are critical. We can talk about even what we saw in the Olympics, in these important games in the medal rounds. These turnovers that happen usually come back, and you’re going to pay a price. That’s something that we have to be aware of here tonight.”