11-22 Preview – Potential Alignment + Fiala talks comfort level, Penalties and Kill, Rushing Rangers

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• News post

• Zach Dooley

The Kings are back on home ice this evening for the first of six straight games in California, with five of those games being played in Los Angeles.

• Cal Petersen
• Drew Doughty
• Sean Durzi
• Kevin Fiala

• Todd McLellan

# Kevin Fiala

In the games, just reading off of everybody else and the system, I feel very comfortable. I know what I’m doing, I don’t have to think the game anymore and I’m just playing right now. It’s good.

I try to play my game, but I don’t think that was the case at the start of the season. When I was [on this line] at first, I didn’t do it. I didn’t have the puck so much and I didn’t skate as much. Now, I’m just more comfortable overall and with the system, with everything really. I feel more comfortable around those two guys and I just have to play my game, have some fun and everything else will settle.

# Todd McLellan

You’re always going to be a step slow, either physically or mentally, if you’re thinking the game [rather than] if you’re just playing it. You have to have a little bit of structure so you’re predictable. I think Kevin’s past that thinking point, certainly if he’s admitting it, he is. I think it’s showing in his play.

It’s interesting that you notice that and it’s true, they’re significantly down, we’re better checking skills and we’re not taking as many families, but this past road trip, we had numerous penalties in the offensive zone, we had some on the power play. So, for as much as you recognize us fixing, I’m also thinking about is it sneaking into our game again? I think in Calgary, we took the three in the o-zone, one on the powerplay and another one in Seattle in the o-zone. Too many.

The New York Rangers do a tremendous job on their entries. They activate the D all the time and we must be aware of it, we must understand how they put themselves in that situation so that it doesn’t always be an out-numbered rush. We started the year poor in that area, got really good and then it stepped away on us a little bit. We spent yesterday talking about those situations in practice and let’s see the group apply it tonight.

# Drew Doughty

If we’re going to take a penalty, we want it to be a hard play in the d-zone or something like that, but we still need to improve on the PK, we’re letting too many in. That’s on the players. We have made a bigger effort in blocking shots as a whole, both on the PK and 5-on-5, so I’m really proud of that, but the bottom line is that teams can’t be scoring all the time.

I don’t think there’s just one play that’s affecting us, they’re kind of scoring on different types of plays. When things don’t go well, you’re going out there, gripping your stick really hard, like ‘I don’t want to be the guy out there that’s going to make a mistake for another PK goal’ and I think we kind of have that in our heads right now. That’s something we need to learn to get out, because when you go out there and grip the stick too hard, things always go wrong. It just seems to always happen that way, so we need to it get out of our heads. We can have a very good PK and we will and hopefully it starts with tonight.

I think it just comes with building confidence and killing a bunch of penalties off and then eventually that thing will be out of your heads.