Facing early adversity, sticking to the script pays early dividends for the Kings

You’ve just begun your playoff campaign on the road. Game 1 in unfriendly confines.

After around five minutes of feeling the game out, a puck takes a bad bounce off a skate and goes directly to one of the NHL’s most lethal goalscorers. He scores to make it 1-0. Minutes later, you find yourself shorthanded. Seconds after that, you’re staring down a 5-on-3 deficit. Seconds more, you’re down 2-0.

If you’re in that situation, what do you do………go.

If you’re the LA Kings, you compose yourself and stay the course.

Why? Because, your opponent is the Edmonton Oilers and you know your opponent very well. Because you know yourself and you know what’s gotten you to this point. Because you’re true to an identity that’s gotten you to this point.

It would have been all too easy for the Kings, in that situation, to deviate from the gameplan. You’re in a 2-0 hole and need to get one back, how easy would it have been to start chasing goals to try and get one? It certainly would have been easier than the latter, which was sticking to the gameplan to claw back the hard way. This isn’t an Avengers situation, where the Kings had a 1 in 14 million chance to come back. It’s two goals in the NHL, there were a lot of outcomes favoring LA.

The Kings knew as a group though that stylistically the only viable way forward was to stay true to what got them there and it paid off.

“We’ve played them enough to know that we can’t do that,” Todd McLellan said after Game 1. “Even down the stretch when we were down by two, we couldn’t let it get to three. We had to check for our chances, be patient, use the clock as much as we could and it worked out in our favor. There’s no guarantee that will happen again, but all we had to do is worry about [Game 1].”

Now, that’s not to say going two goals down on the road is a recipe for success. On other nights, Edmonton would have in fact turned that two-goal lead into a three-goal lead and that’s a very challenging hill to climb. The Kings would obviously have preferred not to be in that position in the first place, but being there, they made the decision as a group to continue the same approach.

That decision resonated throughout the team.

“We just stuck with it, we didn’t start cheating when we were trailing,” goaltender Joonas Korpisalo said of the performance. “We trusted our system and trusted each other. It paid off.”

Photo by Lawrence Scott/Getty Images

Game 1 saw two, different opportunities where things could have deviated from the plan.

The first came late in the opening period, or even into the first intermission, when the Kings were frustrated and unhappy with their level of play at the start. Despite having last year’s seven-game series under their belts as experience, the Kings still started the game a bit tentatively. As much experience as you have, it’s still a change going from Game 82 to Game 1. Despite the deficit, the Kings knew they had to stay the course to have the best chance of coming back into the game.

“It was really important, for sure,” forward Adrian Kempe said of sticking to the script. “I think coming in after the first period, I think obviously there were some nerves out there. As a team, I don’t think we were really happy with the first period, but it was the first [experience with] playoffs since last year, the first playoffs for some guys. We stuck with it, we tried to battle through it.”

The same could be said of the second intermission.

The second period saw the Kings do a good job of calming the game down to a place where things weren’t consistently on edge. They did in fact calm things down, but they also created very little in terms of Grade-A, offensive opportunities. The combination of the two saw the scoreline exactly where it was to begin the opening frame, at 2-0 Oilers.

“Between the second and third, we just talked about sticking to the plan and it worked out,” forward Phillip Danault added. “We didn’t play well in the first two periods, we didn’t play our game really and things started opening up a little bit in the third.”

Opening up offensively, that is, but not at the expense of giving things up the other way.

The Kings surrendered a total of 47 shot attempts in the first 40 minutes, 31 of those being scoring chances and 16 being high-danger chances. So, while they did generate five, high-danger looks in the third, their highest-scoring period of the evening, they also gave up just four, among 13 total shot attempts against. Both were their lowest totals conceded in a period for the game.

“I thought overall we defended pretty good as a group,” defenseman Mikey Anderson said. “Obviously we’re going to give up some chances but whenever we did, Korpi came up big with the save for us.”

In many ways, the refusal to change is an embodiment of what makes the Kings unique.

The Kings are a feisty group. They’re a committed group. They embrace the little things and excel in executing them. Though the stage was larger, the spotlight was brighter and the adversity was greater, they showed a commitment to doing the same things and playing the same way. It wasn’t perfect, but nothing eve is. It was, however, pretty impressive.

“There’s the measurable statistics that occur in a game, everything from shots on goal to the actual score, and then there’s some other things that are immeasurable,” McLellan added. “For us, I think a lot of those things are important, the resiliency, the ability to just stick with the plan, those are important things to our team. I don’t know where we are talent-wise matched up against this group, but we have to rely on some of those other things for us to have success.”

Now, all of that is good, but this is also the last time we’ll be talking about and analyzing Game 1. It was a terrific result for the Kings, but it’s also now in the past. We’re on to Game 2.

The Kings learned very quickly last season that Game 1 success does not mean Game 2 success. After a scoreless opening frame in last year’s second game, Edmonton scored three times in the second period as they skated to a commanding 6-0 victory to even the series. The Kings didn’t recover until Game 4, after being outscored 14-2 in Games 2 and 3, seeing a 1-0 series lead turn into a 2-1 deficit.

Now, they’ve lived that experience and they learned a lesson a season ago. In Game 2 tomorrow night, it’ll be about continuing on the same path from a stylistic standpoint and an approach standpoint as they did in Game 1, while matching the shift in intensity that will come in Game 2.

“The lesson we learned last year, that we weren’t prepared for, is the level of play is going up immensely in Game 2,” McLellan said. “We can talk about Game 1 – we have to now, as much as we want to or need to – but we’ve got to move on.”

Busy day tomorrow, Insiders! Kings and Oilers, Game 2 + Reign and Eagles, Game 1. The entire organization is in action, as will be the case again on Friday evening. Full previews of both games to follow tomorrow, in addition to regular post-game coverage, as both teams continue their respective postseason quests.