10-8 Preview – Gameday Thoughts + Byfield Update, Net Play, Versatility At The Bottom

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• News post

• Zach Dooley

• Quinton Byfield
• Drew Doughty
• Jaret Anderson-Dolan

The Kings are approaching their preseason finale this afternoon, as they host the Anaheim Ducks in a matinee at Crypto.com Arena.

I’ve got to look at it like it’s my first game. It’s my first game back, so I need to be prepared for that, no time to spare. Just leave it all out there and then hopefully I’ll be ready for the home opener. – Quinton Byfield

I got some good rest, you know, I had been playing a lot of hockey so that was nice but you want to be playing hockey every day. That definitely sucked, but they let me ease my way back into it over the last two, three days so I think I’m back up to speed with my cardio and everything. I’m just trying to get back into it. – Quinton Byfield

Our net play, quite frankly, hasn’t been good. We spent a large chunk of practice [yesterday] just working on that one specific area and would like to see it pay dividends as early as tomorrow. It’ll be a work in progress. – Todd McLellan

[Yesterday] in practice, we focused on net play. We’ve been struggling a little bit throughout the preseason and that’s something you obviously don’t work during the summer because you’re not trying to hurt guys or anything like that. That’s something that you need to get back through preseason, because you can’t work on it, it’s probably the main things, defending for real and net play. – Drew Doughty

The practices at the start camp are a little slow, too many guys, not getting enough reps. Now that we’ve narrowed it down, we can work on individual things, like at the end of practice, we worked on 2-on-2s, 1-on-1s and stuff like that. If you do have to start a camp, there’s just too many guys and guys aren’t getting reps. So you have to wait until you pare it down. – Drew Doughty

That player has to be a trusting player. The 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th forward, the seventh or eighth D, you have to be a trusting individual because you might not go every night but when your number’s called, we have to be able to trust you to go in and do the job on both sides of the puck. – Todd McLellan

We have [moved players around] throughout exhibition season, some of it by design, sometimes when it just happens. Guys on the left side, the right side, I think Anderson-Dolan has played just about everywhere. You’re trying to calculate where he fits best, or where whoever that group is fits best in case of injury, poor play and how you spot them in. – Todd McLellan