11-19 Preview – No Morning Skate plus Top Line Takeaways, Petersens Evolving Metrics, Ups and Downs

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• News post

• Zach Dooley

The Kings conclude a four-game roadtrip this evening in Seattle, with the second half of a back-to-back set on the docket.

• Adrian Kempe
• Anze Kopitar
• Gabe Vilardi
• Cal Petersen

• Todd McLellan

# Todd McLellan

Well, if we just look at last night’s game, it’s just finishing. I can’t say they’ve got to shoot quicker or pick a different spot to score on, they they created a number of chances. It’s got to go in for them and it’s as simple as that. They’ve all done it before, they’re all experienced players now, they should all be fairly confident, so it’s got to happen for them.

I think with [Gabe Vilardi], we’re a quarter of the way into the season, he has played in the league before and this is 20 games of a heavy workload and we’ve played a lot of hockey. I don’t think that he is accustomed to that at this level and he’s learning how to manage with it. Some nights, the polish isn’t quite there as much but he’s still creating, he’s still doing a lot of good things on the ice. He does some forechecking for that line, I feel like he’s brought an element of physicality to his game now that he likely didn’t have before or he didn’t use before, so there are good parts to his game. When it comes to playing in the top six and in every situation other than penalty kill, your engine’s got to adjust a little bit and I think he’s getting used to doing that night after night.

Calm – There was a lot of panic in and around the net and [Cal Petersen] made some really good, tough saves and then the one the simple ones he was making. I thought that he managed the game well. There were times where we needed whistles to get rest or changes and he did a real good job of that too.

There certainly were takeaways on both sides. Bad is obviously the outcome, but there were some determining factors, I think, to that outcome. We played well in spurts and then there were too many ups and downs from line to line. I thought the Kupari line really struggled last night and didn’t manage things real well. Gave the goal up 40 seconds or 50 seconds after we scored, that was a bit of a backbreaker. Positive side, I thought we generated a lot of chances but the negative part of that was we didn’t finish. You can flip that script around the other way, we didn’t give up much but they did finish, so frustrating night. We’ve got to park it and move on. We’re going to play against a really good, hard, heavy team tonight that’s playing well.