Angeles Analysis – A Measuring Stick Effort

Saturday’s game against Vegas was a measuring stick effort from the Kings.

It wasn’t a measuring stick result, because the Kings collected one point and not two, but I did feel it was a measuring-stick effort.

In the first eight games of the season, the Kings have played all four division winners from last season. They’ve collected two points from those four games, from overtime losses against Carolina and Vegas. The Carolina game was filled with self-inflicted mistakes throughout the 65 minutes in a game the Kings should have won, in their own words. The Colorado and Boston games, while not poor, saw the Kings second best on those nights.

Saturday night felt a bit different though, even if the end result was still a shootout defeat.

The Kings matched Vegas throughout the course of the evening, with Todd McLellan believing it to be a “hell of a game” between two teams currently towards the top of the Pacific Division standings. It’s a results driven business at the end of the day and I’d imagine that both teams will look at last night and see opportunities where they could have won that game in different ways, with the hosts owning several chances to win in overtime. For the Kings, though, it provided an opportunity to see how they stacked up against an elite team when they, for the most part, played their game. The result was a deadlock through 65 minutes.

“They are the measuring stick, obviously they’ve earned that right,” Head Coach Todd McLellan said after the game. We were able to play a pretty good game, we’re right there with them. When you compare that to maybe what we did against Colorado, Carolina, Boston – some of the other if you want to call them upper-echelon teams, based on their past, I thought we played this one better than those others.”

For the Kings to get to where they believe this team can, simply matching teams like Vegas is not the end goal. But it’s also Game 8 which means there are 74 games remaining in the regular season. At this point in the process, the Kings have two more points than last season and five more than the year before that, The Kings can see the end of the tunnel, so to speak, because they believe they have the right personnel in place to get to that point, but it’s important to understand that they aren’t fully there yet.

“More so than it did three weeks ago, when we started against some of these better teams, but there’s still work to do.”

Work to do has come large in part at the defensive end of the ice, even if it’s been in different ways than when we were saying that last season.

Starts to games have not been at the necessary level early in the season and were it not for an extremely resilient effort, and turnaround in mentality, on Friday in Arizona, perhaps the tone would be a little bit different off this weekend. The Kings started the game much better on Saturday, but still needed a pair of Grade-A stops from Cam Talbot early to keep the game 0-0 to get.

With that being said, throughout the night and in both directions, ice was a lot harder to come by against the Golden Knights than in the high-flying games in Arizona. It’s an area that both McLellan and defenseman Drew Doughty spoke about after Friday’s game, was that the way the Kings started against the Coyotes would not fly in the long run. Doughty specifically mentioned the next two games on the schedule, which were at the time Vegas and Toronto, and at least in the first half of that set, that area was better.

I think there’s some hope that Saturday’s game can be one the Kings build off of, because even in a shootout defeat, there were some very strong takeaways from the way they played. The Kings won both games against Arizona, but Saturday was their strongest 60(+) minutes of the week, perhaps of the season. Heading into their first three-game trip of the season, that will be needed again, game-over-game. Technically, it’s four straight games away, if you include the rematch in Vegas on the way back. If you do include Vegas, the combined record of those four teams early in the season is 21-9-3. While that record is powered by Toronto and Vegas, the Senators and Flyers are both off to solid starts, with the East much more compact than the disparity in the West in the early goings. The Kings know there are no games off on this trip and they’ll have to be ready to fly.

“Toronto, Ottawa, Philly, they’re all having real good starts, not an easy trip, there isn’t a night where you can show up with your B game,” McLellan said. “Each team is playing a little different, they have strengths and weaknesses that may differ from the other, but we’re going to have our group rested, first back to back for our group [last weekend] and then be prepared to play.”

The Kings took off a day early for Toronto, flying North yesterday and arriving in Canada around dinner time last night. They’ll hit the ice for practice in a couple of hours this afternoon in Toronto, in preparation for tomorrow’s tilt with the Maple Leafs. More to follow here on the trip, as we’ll have all the coverage on LAKI!