Kings need more offense from defense

In discussing the Kings’ offensive struggles, the forwards clearly get the bulk of the attention, but what about the defensemen? As noted in a breakdown below, the Kings rank 26th (tied with Calgary) for fewest points by defensemen this season, with 20. Breaking down 5-on-5 vs. power play might be even more stark, as 11 of those defensemen points have come on the power play. Jack Johnson is the only active Kings defenseman with a goal this season, and he has four (the dearly departed Slava Voynov has two). Terry Murray talked today about the need to get the defensemen going on offense, and I’ll follow that with the team-by-team list of defensive scoring this season…

MURRAY: “I think we can get a lot more pucks to the net from our back end. Jack, he has put up some numbers. Martinez, his numbers, they’re down. I think his number of shots on net is pretty good, but the bottom line is, put more pucks to the net. When you take a look around, at our scoring, Kopitar leads our team in shots. You see the top-scoring teams in the NHL, the top individuals, they’ve got the high numbers, they’re leading the league in the shots on goal. So there’s no secret to it for Drew. We need him to put pucks to the net and we need it in timely fashion.’’

Team, with goals-assists-points
Philadelphia 5-32-37
Florida 8-28-36
Ottawa 4-32-36
Toronto 3-33-36
Vancouver 10-25-35
Colorado 4-30-34
Washington 9-24-33
Tampa Bay 8-25-33
Columbus 9-19-28
Winnipeg 6-22-28
Pittsburgh 4-24-28
Boston 2-26-28
Phoenix 6-21-27
Carolina 3-24-27
Dallas 9-17-26
Nashville 6-20-26
St. Louis 6-20-26
San Jose 5-20-25
Chicago 2-22-24
Detroit 9-14-23
Anaheim 4-19-23
NY Rangers 8-13-21
Montreal 3-18-21
Kings 6-14-20
Calgary 4-16-20
Edmonton 6-12-18
NY Islanders 2-13-15
Minnesota 4-9-13
New Jersey 2-11-13