Waking up with the Kings: February 10

Several abbreviated thoughts on Los Angeles 6-3 win over Florida Thursday night:

-Being “due” for something is only loosely measurable and doesn’t really matter in sports, no matter how it fits a narrative, but it wasn’t difficult to foresee the Kings snapping out of their offensive schneid to some degree against the Florida Panthers after having generated a perfectly respectable number of scoring chances over the past two losses without anything to show for it. They busted out of their PDO blues, scoring 1:39 into the game and three times in the first 15 minutes, and chased James Reimer from the net, and after a 9-of-12 Roberto Luongo performance, chased him as well. Big goals can be scored in first periods, and all three were important: Dustin Brown’s opened the scoring and allowed the team to play with the lead, Jeff Carter’s provided an early two-goal cushion, and Tyler Toffoli’s, which followed Jussi Jokinen’s marker by 2:55, once again established a two-goal lead and set the stage for the game to evolve into a rout in the second period.

-Los Angeles came out the way it was probably expected to come out following the back-to-back ugly losses and with one final game before the bye week. Of course, they didn’t come out poorly in the previous two games – they generated at least two scoring chances on their first shift at Tampa Bay and logged 19 shots in the first 20 minutes – but didn’t get saves on key scoring chances early on and made mistakes that ended up in the back of their net with a debilitating frequency. Overall, the scoring chances on the road trip favored the Kings in all four games (if you remove the academic developments of the final five minutes of last night’s game, which handed a very narrow lead in chances by Bo’s count), though only narrowly in the two lopsided losses. The result was that the team finished 2-2-0, and playing .500 hockey on the road is satisfactory, especially considering the team just finished playing 10 games in 10 different buildings and will wake up in the morning one point up on Calgary with a game in hand and 17 of the remaining 27 games at Staples Center. They weren’t able to take advantage of a heavy home schedule last month, and have another seven-gamer upcoming, but their position is not a bad one to be in, especially considering that the focus when Jonathan Quick went down, per Darryl Sutter, was to remain within the group until the injured players returned. They’re doing that, and during this road-heavy stretch, it deserves notice. This is a team that will find out whether it is a playoff team in game 80, 81 or 82, as previously noted, via the four remaining games (!) against the Flames.

–Holy schnykies, was Drew Doughty fantastic with and without the puck. It didn’t come through on the scoresheet – he didn’t attempt a shot – but he calmed plays down in his own end during frantic moments and allowed the team to restart its structure and change forward lines. On a second period power play, he so efficiently cut down an angle against Vincent Trocheck, who is among Florida’s fastest skaters, and channeled him directly into the boards in front of the Panthers’ bench. There was a lot of subtlety in his game, which for the last several months has risen to the high level it had been at for virtually all of last year.

-That’s it until Wednesday, Insiders. Lindsay will post Kings news as it comes up, but barring anything significant that could hypothetically result in a conference call, this conversation will be on hold for the next five days. Let’s talk (relatively) soon, Insiders. Thank you, as always, for reading.