Practice emphasis

In addressing what has been going wrong with the Kings of late, there’s two sides of it, a mental side and a technical side. We’ll get into some of the “mental” stuff later, but first, here’s Terry Murray explaining the points of emphasis in practice today as he tries to get things turned around, particularly on the offensive side…

MURRAY: “There have been several games here now, in a row, that our shot total has dropped off. We’ve fallen off that attitude that is about getting to the net, which forces pucks to the net, when we have the screens there. Our cycle that we’ve been using, right through the training camp, has to be reinforced. It’s not an automatic, when you just want to go out and play the game and have fun. It’s something you have to have focus on, with one forward establishing a net presence. It pops up every time you’re coaching a game. We’re talking about it between periods. We’re talking about in on the bench. We went through it just the other day, actually, with the three-day break, but it’s something that we have to get re-established in our game.

“The other part of it is the compete. We did 5-on-5 compete, pushing and competing, pinning and sealing. That’s another area of the game that sometimes starts to slip as you just play games, and you have to bring focus to it.”