It’s a best-of-three series, as the Kings take a “moving on” mentality into Game 5

“I’ve lived this, on the other side. This team was down, this organization was down three games before they moved on. They have, within that locker room, there’s a couple of guys that lived through that and they share that story. Then there’s others, there’s Danault and Arvidsson, they’ve played in Stanley Cup Finals and I know they didn’t win 16 games straight, or 15 if they didn’t win the cup. To get there, there’s ups and downs all the time and you have to be mentally strong to deal with it. While we talk all year about individual players and the team collectively, you try and build your team up for these days when it goes good or it goes bad. It’s not always about scoring goals and shooting the pucks, it’s about being mentally strong and recovering. I think we have those skills in our room.”

If there was concern about the team’s ability to respond between Game 4 and Game 5, I’m not sure that there should be any longer after reading Todd McLellan’s answer from yesterday morning.

He’s seen what this organization can do when responding from a down note in the postseason as an opposing coach. Last season, he saw it as the bench boss for the Kings, as the group bounced back from consecutive, six-goal defeats to push the Oilers to the brink of elimination with wins in Games 4 and 5. In the here and now, he just watched the Kings play what was probably their best game of the series, despite its second-period flaws, but come up empty with an overtime defeat.

That begs the natural questions that follow – how do you avoid hanging your heads after a challenging defeat and prepare for the next game? McLellan knows his team pretty well and he’s got little concern that they will answer the call.

“I don’t think anybody’s going to hang their head with our group,” McLellan said. “I’m not worried about our group one bit. I know our group pretty well, they’ll have their heads up.”

As he said, it starts with the veterans.

Anze Kopitar and Drew Doughty were the two players who were a part of that 2014 comeback win, from 3-0 down, so what’s an overtime defeat to those players to make it a 2-2 series? Kopitar himself put it simply after Game 4.

“We’ll be frustrated tonight, but tomorrow is a new day and we’ve got to be ready for Game 5. That’s how it is.”

As McLellan mentioned, Viktor Arvidsson and Phillip Danault, as well as defenseman Alex Edler, have played in the Stanley Cup Finals and you don’t win three rounds without losing a game where you liked your team’s play, feeling as if you could have won. Probably happens in just about every series from one perspective or another.

The Kings have confidence in their leadership to help steer the guide in the right direction.

“I think we have a lot of confidence in our guys, [Kopitar] and Dewey are just incredible leaders and they keep us on the right track all the time,” forward Trevor Moore said. “No matter what the score is, we’re just going to keep chugging along and playing our game.”

Defenseman Matt Roy called Kopitar a “leader by example”, who brings an even-keeled and calming presence to the room.

As we saw earlier this month, after a subpar start to the game in Vegas back in the regular season, Kopitar isn’t afraid to stand up in front of the room and let the group know when something has to be better. When you factor in how level he typically is, when he does go that route, it speaks volumes. In this situation, however, it’s the ability to roll over from game to game, doing things the right way, that Roy and his teammates trust in Kopitar to bring.

“Kopi, to me, is a lead by example guy and he’s always one of our best players, he’s going to look after us and he’s you know he’s going to do his job very well,” Roy said. “That just kind of keeps the team even keel, he just keeps us moving in the right direction.”

Photo by Andy Devlin/NHLI via Getty Images

Kopitar’s level is important, as is Doughty’s and as is that of the other veterans on this team. The Kings will continue to lean on those guys to lead the way, but this is no longer a group that hasn’t been there before.

Now, it’s quite the opposite.

The Kings are, by age, the second-youngest group in the postseason but as McLellan said before the series began, there aren’t any rookies on this team anymore. The Kings have had just one player make his postseason debut over the first four games – forward Jaret Anderson-Dolan. So, for the most part, everyone has now been there and done that. The Kings lineup in Game 4 had 563 games of playoff experience, compared to 620 for the Oilers. That’s only a few games per guy on average and this group now has more guys with 10-20 playoff games than last year’s group that saw so many between 0 and 10. Feels like a small distinction, but it’s actually a pretty big one

This team, with many of the same pieces, played in Game 5 at Rogers Place a season ago and found a way to get the job done.

“Almost everybody in this series has been there before, on both sides of the coin,” McLellan said. “I don’t think there’s a true rookie involved in the series, at least from our perspective, so everybody’s been in a playoff game before and everybody’s felt it.”

As the series shifts back to Edmonton, we’re in a familiar place. First it was the Kings that turned a best-of-seven to a best-of-five with home-ice advantage. The Oilers returned serve yesterday, as five became three.

You can’t mindread what Edmonton’s preferences would be in certain situations, but I’m sure that at the very least, there aren’t any surprises to see this series be where it is through four games. From a Kings perspective, though, McLellan said he would have taken this situation if you offered it to him before the series.

“If somebody said, you know what, let’s just start at Game 5 all even, we’d take a swing at that,” McLellan added. “I’m not sure that they would, but we would take a swing at that and that’s what we’re doing.”

Now, it’s about execution. The Kings believe they have the experience to help guide them through the adversity they’ll face in Game 5 and the character within their locker room in order to use it.

For the second straight season, it’s a best-of-three series for the Kings. Externally, it’s not a situation most predicted, as the “Oilers in 5” crowd was larger than you might think it should have been. It’s where we’re at, though, and it’s there for the taking.

“It’s almost déjà vu, I don’t think anybody thought we would be in this situation, again, where we can challenge this team, but we believe we can, and we’ll recover,” McLellan said. “We lost 6-0 and 8-2 last year to set us up for Game 5. It’s obviously a lot closer, we’ve closed the gap a little bit and while we’ve improved, they’ve improved also. Good series.”

A good series that writes its next chapter this evening.