A good bounceback for the fellas.
If the final game of 2022 was a disappointment, and it certainly was for the Kings internally, then the first game of 2023 brought what you were looking for. Following the loss against the Flyers on Saturday, the Kings got back on the right track last night with the type of performance they’re looking for, a hard-fought, 3-2 victory over the Central Division leading Dallas Stars.
The Kings actually have three consecutive games against division leaders, with Atlantic Division leading Boston coming to town tomorrow evening and the Kings traveling Las Vegas for a Saturday evening showdown against the Pacific Division leading Golden Knights. A tough road to hoe.
Talking with goaltender Pheonix Copley after the game, he spoke about how last night’s game is the way you want to start an upcoming stretch that features six of the next seven games at home. “We can build off of that and get ready for the next one.”
They certainly can.
Todd McLellan was asked after the game during his post-game availability if he considered the win over Dallas to be a “statement win”. He is frequently asked to label wins, though usually pertaining to the character variety as opposed to the statement variety. When asked yesterday, McLellan said it was a statement “just to ourselves” as opposed to say to Dallas specifically, or to the league or the masses as a whole. It was the way the Kings wanted to bounce back after the loss to the Flyers, but the statement made was most important to be made internally.
“We have to do things right all the time to have success,” McLellan detailed. “That’s not to discredit what Philly came in and did, they played a good game and they swept every team in California. But, we just didn’t have it that night and we responded well, so we made a statement to each other in the locker room but not to anybody else.”
If you look at the sandwich of the new year, the Kings did the things they wanted to in one of the two games, but not the other. If you zero in on that sample size specifically, you’d say it’s a statement of the season. If you expand that sample size a bit further though, to incorporate the games preceding, you’d find that the Kings have begun to find consistency consistently.
Say that five times fast!
Since the third period in Buffalo, the Kings have rattled off a stretch of 7-1-1. That stretch included several performances that have mostly fallen within the realm of how the Kings want to play. If you look at the games when they didn’t, by their own admission, you’d be looking at wins over San Jose and Colorado and the loss to Philadelphia. Even in games against the Sharks and Flyers, the Kings did not concede much in terms of chances against and both games were 2-2 in the third period. Colorado was a character-driven comeback from two goals down in the third period to snap a nine-game losing streak against the defending Stanley Cup champions. A lot to be said for that. The one overtime defeat was a tight-checking game in Arizona, on the second half of a back-to-back heading into the holidays. Not much from that stretch that signalled inconsistency, even if it wasn’t 9-0. After what we could clearly define as inconsistency in the weeks prior, that’s a good sign, especially beginning a very difficult month ahead.
A big part of yesterday’s win coincided with an effective game from the top line. The Kings have gotten offensive contributions throughout their top nine as of late, with that driving force shifting night-to-night.
Looking at the last three games, it was the forwards from the second line that contributed twice in Colorado, the third line that Todd McLellan called the teams best against Philadelphia and the first line that scored twice last night in the win over Dallas. McLellan highlighted Quinton Byfield has playing “as good a game as we’ve seen” this season, while game-winning goalscorer Adrian Kempe believed his line played well and he credited Byfield’s impact on that.
The dispersal of chances would tell you that line trended positively in the Philadelphia game, without reward, and trended quite positively last night, with advantages of 9-4 in scoring chances and 6-2 in high-danger chances. They also got the reward through Anze Kopitar’s goal in the second period and Kempe’s tally on the power play, a rare goal off the rush in that setting. Get all three of those lines going at their respective rates on the same night, along with the regular energy provided by the fourth unit? Look out!
The Kings opted for an off-ice workout today as opposed to an on-ice practice. This happens from time to time and today likely would have been a very short skate as well. The last practice in between two games was around 15 minutes, start to finish, before most of the high-minute guys came off. No more than 30 for even the lowest-minute guys after the win over Colorado. Imagine we would have seen much of the same today had they taken the ice. Vefore the Kings host the Bruins, they will skate tomorrow morning in El Segundo and we’ll expect that to be of the full-team variety. More to follow before a rematch from the first win of that 7-1-1 stretch – Boston – visits tomorrow night!
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