Top guns not scoring, or shooting

Why are the Kings slumping on offense? Their top four goal scorers this season — Ryan Smyth, Justin Williams, Dustin Brown and Anze Kopitar — have combined for two goals in the team’s last six games. Brown and Kopitar, in particular, have had the steepest drop-offs, beyond the last six games. Kopitar had 14 goals in his first 29 games this season, but has two goals in his last 18 games (he does have 14 assists in that span). Brown had seven goals in a nine-game span in December, but has one goal in his last 12 games. To be certain, Terry Murray has noticed.

MURRAY: “I’ve been looking at that. I don’t know. Kopi has a couple goals in his last 18 games. It’s hard to know what that chemistry is sometimes, where you can just point to one area and say, `This is what it needs to get back to,’ or, `This is where you need to get to when things are not going on the offensive part of the game.’ But clearly it’s not right now. I think we’re looking to pass the net into the puck sometimes, too often. A great example for me is the end of the game against Phoenix, when Brownie comes down the left-wing side and cuts to the inside. That is the move, as a right-hand shot, that you dream of, and now we want to pass it. So whether he lost the puck, it’s hard for me to tell on my high-camera look, but it certainly looked like a wonderful opportunity, just to show a real shot mentality. I think, right now, we’re just trying to be a little too far away from the net, a little too fancy with the puck. Once you lose that little feel that you’ve had as a line, that gives you the success, it’s hard to recapture it real quick. But that’s what we have to keep working toward.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, the drop in goal totals for Kopitar and Brown has been accompanied by a drop in their shot-on-goal totals. Kopitar, in his first 29 games, was averaging 3.62 shots on goal per game. In his last 18 games, he has averaged 3.22 shots on goal per game. Brown averaged 2.97 shots on goal in his first 35 games. In his last 12 games, he has averaged 2.17.

MURRAY: “We keep track of the shot totals of our team and our individuals. It’s on a board in the players’ lounge. We also track the league, the top 10 guys. We’re trying to get a visual, a comparable, every day, to drive home that attitude of shooting the puck to get your numbers up into that top-10 group that’s there on the league side of it. We have a ways to go on that. We have a couple guys that are willing to get the puck to the net fairly consistently, but that whole attitude is something that you can develop. It’s a learned skill, and that’s what we’ve been trying to push real hard here in the last couple years. We need to, as a team, get our shot number up. The last game against Phoenix, we had a shot-at-net total of 72. That’s very good. We’re trying to get a goal of 65 every game. We feel, by doing that, that we’re going to find a way to get it done. But we’re hitting a dry well right now.”