Road mentality needed at home

The lack of home success in this Kings-Sharks series — and throughout the first round of the playoffs, really — has already been well-documented. In this series, the road team has won four consecutive games. Can the Kings break that streak tonight? Nobody really has a cogent explanation as to why the home team can’t seem to win — just one of those things — but both Terry Murray and Dustin Brown talked today about the Kings’ need to duplicate their road efforts at home…

MURRAY: “We have to bring that kind of mentality here. The thing that you have to be heads up on, in a game like this here tonight is, you go on the road in Game 5, you play with a great deal of focus and you know you had to pay a lot of prices in order to win that game. You come back and you take a little sigh of relief, you take your foot off the gas pedal, and now they’re coming in with the same attitude we had in Game 5. So we’ve got to be heads up on that, and make sure you’re ready to play the right way.

“If you’re not intense every shift, and really aware of what’s going on, teams today will find a way to make you pay a price. Certainly the way San Jose is, with their high-end skill, they’re going to take advantage of any space and time that you give them. So the attitude is that of a road game. You don’t have to entertain. You just have to win the game. You have to dig in and play a heavy game. A dot-to-board game is critical for us here tonight. We have to make sure we’re taking the body and getting stick on puck and try to get into those passing lanes down below the goal line, where they look to make those quick plays, those tap-ins.”

Brown was asked what, in particular, the Kings needed to improve upon at home…

BROWN: “Probably our intensity in our D-zone. I mean, Quicker lets in six goals (in each game) but you look at a lot of those goals and he didn’t really have a chance. That’s pretty uncharacteristic for this team. I mean, Quicker makes big saves for us, but it’s not too often that we’re giving up tap-in goals, back door. I don’t know how many they had in that come-from-behind game. They had a lot of empty-net goals, and that’s just a matter of guys focusing. We’ve got to find a way to bring our focus, that we have on the road, back here. That’s up to the responsibility of each individual to bring their own game.”

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