4/6 Preview – Danault expected to return + Morning skate notes, 24’s Impact, Home cooking down the stretch

WHO: Los Angeles Kings (40-25-11) vs. Vancouver Canucks (47-21-8)
WHAT: NHL REGULAR-SEASON GAME
WHEN: Saturday, April 6 @ 7:00 PM Pacific
WHERE: Crypto.com Arena – Los Angeles, CA
HOW TO FOLLOW: VIDEO: Bally Sports So-Cal – AUDIO – iHeart Radio – TWITTER: @DooleyLAK & @LAKings

TONIGHT’S MATCHUP: The Kings return home to take on the Vancouver Canucks in a potential playoff preview at Crypto.com arena.

HEAD-TO-HEAD: Forwards Kevin Fiala and Anze Kopitar lead the Kings this season with four points apiece, two goals and two assists each, while forward Trevor Moore also has two goals and forward Quinton Byfield leads the way with three assists.

KINGS VITALS: Following a day off yesterday, the Kings held a mostly full-team morning skate here today, with a few players taking the optional.

The Kings are expected to turn back to goaltender Cam Talbot in tonight’s game against Vancouver. Talbot has started all three games against the Canucks so far this season, posting a record of 2-0-1, and brings a lifetime mark of 13-3-5 versus Vancouver throughout his career, along with a .929 save percentage and a 1.99 goals-against average.

The Kings did not take line rushes here this morning, but a potential alignment for tonight, based on jersey colors –

Byfield – Kopitar – Kempe
Moore – Danault – Arvidsson
Fiala – Dubois – Laferriere
Thomas – Lizotte – Lewis
(Danault)

Anderson – Doughty
Gavrikov – Roy
Englund – Spence

Rittich / Talbot

For tonight, expect to see forward Phillip Danault back in the lineup against the Canucks. More on his return below. Forward Carl Grundstrom remains on LTIR with a lower-body injury. He took the morning skate today, but will not be activated to play tonight against the Canucks, per Head Coach Jim Hiller. Danault appears set to check in for defenseman Jacob Moverare, who was on late after today’s morning skate. That would signal a 12F / 6D alignment, but we’ll wait until warmups to know for sure.

Additionally, forward Alex Turcotte, who is on LTIR, was on the ice in a non-contact jersey with the extras. Turcotte wasn’t out there with the full group but came on later to continue his own rehab.

CANUCKS VITALS: Vancouver enters tonight’s game with a five-point lead for the Pacific Division title, with six games left to play, though the Oilers have one more in hand.

Look for goaltender Casey DeSmith to get the start tonight for the visitors. DeSmith has faced the Kings four times throughout his NHL career, posting a record of 1-3-0, with a .874 save percentage and a 3.35 goals-against average.

Per Brendan Batchelor of Sportsnet 650, here’s how the Canucks lined up last time out, in a 2-1 win over Arizona –

Projected #Canucks lines vs. @ArizonaCoyotes

Höglander. Pettersson. Boeser.
Joshua. Miller. Garland.
Mikheyev. Blueger. Podkolzin.
Friedman. Åman. Lafferty.

Hughes. Hronek.
Soucy. Myers.
Zadorov. Cole.

🥅#ArtyParty 🥅

7pm on @Sportsnet650 https://t.co/KAgpi3gWwj pic.twitter.com/xp3SymnxsZ

— Brendan Batchelor (@BatchHockey) April 4, 2024

Regular starting goaltender Thatcher Demko is on long-term injured reserve and is not an option to play tonight. Defenseman Quinn Hughes leads all defensemen with 70 assists this season, a total that also ranks fourth in the league amongst all skaters. The Canucks have three players – Hughes, Elias Pettersson and J.T. Miller – scoring at over a point-per-game pace this season.

Notes –
Philling Out The Lineup Card
Welcome Back, Phillip Danault!

By all accounts, it looks as if the Kings will welcome Danault back into their lineup this evening against Vancouver. Danault has missed the last four games with an upper-body injury with the Kings going 2-2 with him out of action. In a potential playoff preview tonight against the Canucks, Danault returns to the Kings lineup at a pivotal moment. He’s a huge piece for the Kings and everyone will be excited to have him back.

With regards to tonight, Danault will likely be stepping back into a high-intensity game with playoff implications. The first three games this season between the Kings and Canucks have had that feeling and expecting nothing less from this one as well.

“It should take me maybe a couple of shifts to get back into it, but I haven’t been out too long, so it should be good,” Danault said this morning. “Obviously the pace is really high, especially against Vancouver, they’re a tough team. It’s going to take a couple of shifts and I’ll be right there.”

The other side of the coin, as Jim Hiller pointed out, is that Danault was able to get a bit of a breather at a tough time of the year.

The Kings have had a congested schedule, with four games in six nights in four different cities. You could see by the third period in San Jose that the Kings didn’t have a ton left in the tank. Danault sat out those four games with an upper-body injury that kept him out of game action, but didn’t prevent him from skating on his own. He had the chance to spare his body a bit, while still getting “bagged pretty hard” the last couple of days to keep the fitness up.

Hiller is hoping to see a fresh Danault in tonight’s game.

“The other side of that you can say is he’s probably a little fresher,” Hiller said. “We’ve played a lot of games, with travel, all those kinds of things, so I’m thinking they would balance each other out. It might be the first few shifts tonight, it might be a little bit of a stretch for him, but I would think he will have good legs.”

The Kings will certainly welcome back Danault, who provides his usual level of high-caliber, two-way play on the team’s second forward line. Regardless of his wingers, Danault plays hard and plays all 200 feet of the ice. The Kings went 2-2-0 in his absence and forward Blake Lizotte was a player who really stepped up his own game, playing an elevated role and delivering some of this best hockey of the season over the last four games.

Having a player like Lizotte continue that level, while adding Danault back in, gives the Kings the depth down the middle they’ve built their team around. Now is the time in the season when the Kings want to find their game, as they continue to push for a playoff spot and, ideally, build some momentum heading into the postseason. That’s Danault’s aim as he re-enters the lineup.

“The playoff push, every game is super important for us,” he added. “That’s what we’ve got to get to, that consistency in our game, all the little details. It’s a long season and there’s ups and downs, but now is the time to run with everything.”

Home Cooking
Well, well, well. How the turntables………

Since the NHL All-Star break, now a span of nearly two months, the LA Kings lead the NHL in winning percentage on home ice. The Kings have posted a record of 10-2-1 in that stretch, good for a .808 winning percentage, the only team in the league to top .800 at home in that span.

It’s a stark turn of events.

The narrative, and rightly so, for so long was how poorly the Kings performed at home. They were a bottom five team for a large stretch of the season, despite leading the NHL in road record. Things have kind of reversed here over the last two months, with the Kings around .500 since the break but topping the charts at home. Not that the former is ideal, but the improvements in Los Angeles have been noticeable and important.

“It’s huge, I think we know that our first half wasn’t great at home and it was something that we wanted to correct,” forward Trevor Moore said. “It’s awesome to be able to do that and we just want to keep pushing.”

We’ve been down this road before and there’s been no switch flipped and nothing changed by choice. It wasn’t necessarily explainable then and it’s really not now, either. It has been noticeable though.

“At the beginning of the season, we weren’t very good at home, but we want to make teams fear coming into our building,” forward Quinton Byfield added. “Since then, we’ve been playing some good hockey at home and we want to continue that into the home stretch.”

Byfield noted that perhaps things snowballed a bit early on. When you don’t win a ton at home, things can add up, it gets in the back of your head and results spiral a bit.

Regardless of the reasoning, the Kings will play five of their final six regular-season games at Crypto.com Arena. Should they qualify for the playoffs, it’d be highly unlikely they’d open at home, but getting there should be a chance to build a bit of momentum with the bulk of the games from here on out coming on home ice.

The team has felt that support and backing from the crowd here of late and is hoping to continue to use that for momentum heading into the all-important finish.

“You always love to play in front of your home fans and I think our friends, the last few home games, have been electric,” Hiller added. “[On Wednesday], the two breakaways were the loudest I’ve head the building maybe all year, so we always like that, but the game, has to be played a similar style, whether you’re home or on the road. You can’t open it up just because you’re at home, that’s every coach’s concern, they’ll tell you that forever, but we certainly like being in front of that crowd, that energy. It drives us.”

Big one tonight, Insiders!

Kings are down to a magic number of six entering the day. St. Louis also plays tonight in San Jose. With a Kings win combined with a Blues regulation defeat, there would be a clinching scenario tomorrow afternoon……but we’ll see how the next 24 hours shake out.