Kings will try to be quicker on draws

Have the Vancouver Canucks figured out the secret to winning faceoffs against the Kings? In Game 1 of this series, the Kings went 33-for-74 on faceoffs, a 45-percent success rate. In the regular season, the teams played four times. In the first two games, the Kings won 53 and 62 percent of faceoffs, respectively, but in the latter two games, the Kings won 42 and 44 percent of the draws. Faceoff percentage, on its own, isn’t a determining factor — the team that won the faceoff battle has won two of the five games — but faceoffs are certainly important in terms of puck control and scoring chances, particularly on special teams. Darryl Sutter was asked today about responsibilities for faceoff wins, and not just with the centers who take them…

SUTTER: “First off, a clean loss is an individual responsibility. A clean loss is, but after that it becomes the responsibility of the wingers, and knowing where we’re going. There’s three zones, with different faceoff situations, and both teams do a lot of different things in all three zones on faceoffs. So the centermen, the quarterbacks, are going in and they have to make everybody aware of where the faceoff coverage is, win or lose.’’