12-17 Preview – Full Team Morning Skate + Roster and Lineup Moves, Spences Development, An Interesting Take

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• News post

• Zach Dooley

The LA Kings are finally back in California, though without much rest, as they take on the San Jose Sharks this evening at Crypto.com Arena.

• Pheonix Copley
• Adrian Kempe
• Alex Iafallo
• Viktor Arvidsson
• Rasmus Kupari
• Jordan Spence

• Todd McLellan

# Todd McLellan

We appreciated some of the things that [Adrian Kempe] was doing, we said this about Iafallo last year, we still appreciated some of the things that he was doing on the ice. The puck wasn’t going in the net for him, but now he’s scoring. We’re not going to overplay him, we’re sure not going to underplay him. We shuffled him around on the lines a little bit, maybe take advantage of it, but other than that there won’t be dramatic changes in distribution of his time.

[Jordan Spence’s] strengths are puck movement, vision, he executes well, he’s got some offensive instincts. What did he need to work on, well, size and strength. He’s not going to grow much more, but he can get stronger and he did that over the summer and some of that was evident in his ability to defend in and around the net at the American League level, that’s improved. That was an area that we asked him to take care of and he’s done that.

It’s interesting, because we were talking about it this morning, is this game one of a homestand or game seven of a road trip? I don’t know how we go about it and we can talk ourselves into the first game at home, rust and all that type of stuff, we don’t want to go there, so maybe it’s the seventh game of the road trip, we just happen to have our fans and our building. We have to play well from the beginning and maintain it or even get better as the night goes on.

# Jordan Spence

For me, I’ve just got to keep it simple, making the right play, making good passes. I think if you keep it simple in defensive zone, it leads to the offensive zone and that’s where I can make plays and I can make stuff happen. That’s what I’ve been trying to improve on with the Reign and hopefully I can do that here as well.

Body position is really important, especially for myself, just being in the right position, where their sticks are at. In front of the net, obviously there’s bigger guys so for me, I’ve just got to keep it simple and be in the right position to end [plays].

I think it’s good to pair up with Eds, keep my game simple in the first period, keep my game simple and go from there.