Ready to step up?

Depending on how you look at it, it’s either “pressure” or “opportunity.” Terry Murray prefers to call it the latter, but clearly there will be significant attention on Jack Johnson while Drew Doughty is out of the lineup. Now, Johnson is clearly the Kings’ best puck-moving defenseman and its best option as a power-play quarterback. In the past, Johnson has embraced the opportunity to take a more aggressive role on the offensive side of the game, but he has also shown himself to be vulnerable to major mistakes in the offensive zone, mistakes that lead to odd-man rushes for opponents.

Johnson played 25-plus minutes in Thursday’s game and had a minus-3 rating, and while we’ve talked here about how that can be a misleading statistic, no matter how you look at it, the Kings will need a lot from Johnson. Assistant coach John Stevens took Johnson aside for a laptop video review in the Pepsi Center seats just before practice today, and after practice, Murray talked about Johnson’s future.

MURRAY: “I think this is a great opportunity for Jack. When you have a player out of the lineup like Drew Doughty, it now becomes your time. I look back two years, and I kind of see the same scenario when Jack got injured in the second game of that season and he missed 42 games. That’s when Drew just said, `OK, climb on my shoulders, I’m going to start to go here.’ That’s the attitude, and I think that’s the opportunity for Jack right now, to clearly step up and take charge and play those big minutes, critical minutes, and get the job done. It’s a challenge, but it’s a challenge that, as far as I can remember, all hockey players like to embrace.”