Murray: `Opportunities are there’

As noted earlier, the Kings went back to their traditional line combinations this morning, although after practice, Terry Murray indicated that he hadn’t yet set his lineup for tomorrow night’s game against Pittsbugh. One thing Murray rejected, out of hand, was wholesale changes simply as a reactionary move in response to the Kings’ recent lack of offense…

MURRAY: “That’s too easy. Changing things, that’s the easy way for players right now. The offensive part of the game is something we’ve discussed many times. It needs to improve. Changing lines up, you throw the chemistry off, maybe. You’re giving the players another period of time in order to get themselves organized and get feeling good and get that line chemistry back in place again, and I don’t want to do that. They’ve been together for several games, and you put the onus right back on the players by keeping them together and saying, `Look, this has to be worked out.’ We talked about it before practice, in a team meeting. Instead of video, it was more my opinion of what I saw in the game last night. What I saw in the video confirmed my opinion this morning. So I just expressed that to them. Now it comes back to, it’s time to pick our game up here, on that side of it.

“You can’t make it too complicated, and I don’t want to. You want to get the puck on the sticks of your best players as often as you can. You want to see possession. You want to see, if there’s a dump-in, a more consistent forecheck recovery of pucks, especially. That can get better. The other part is, we had 55 shots at the net last night. We end up with 19 on net. The opportunities are there. We need to be more diligent about getting pucks through to the net and more diligent at having a net presence in order to take the eyes away from these goaltenders who are the top guys in the league.’’

Murray was also asked about Justin Williams’ comments about involving the defensemen more on the offensive part of the game…

MURRAY: “Sure. That is, I think, a big part of the game today. The checking mentality of every team in the league is to shut down, with a home-plate attitude. When they do that, it opens up the top. We had some really good looks with the puck up top with our defensemen last night. Those are the ones we need to get through. A little better at finding a way to get by that first man, and let the second-layer guys start to take over, whether it’s a loose puck or just a rebound. On the other side of it, our defense, on cycles in the offensive rotations, we are really encouraging our defensemen to get up and be involved, jumping in from the offensive blue line and getting to the net. You can’t hang out there. You’ve got to get in and get out. But we have guys that are very capable of putting up some points for us, from the back end.’’