FINAL - Kings 2, Stars 5 - Kopitar, Danault, McLellan - LA Kings Insider
# FINAL - Kings 2, Stars 5 - Kopitar, Danault, McLellan - LA Kings Insider
# Contributors
# Summary
The LA Kings were unable to make it two-for-two to begin a three-game road trip, as they fell by a 5-2 final in Dallas on Tuesday evening.
# Players
# Staff
# Notes and Quotes
# Phillip Danault
It definitely got us in trouble right away. We can’t do that because we knew they were fresh, they had two days off and we definitely have to be better and more careful with that. Yeah, they definitely cost us the game.
Execution. They were playing better and faster than us and also the penalties got us, lots of penalties. We couldn’t find a way to get it done and the whole game was like that.
Yeah, especially because we know how good we can play and how good we can be as a team. We want to improve every game and on a back to back, it’s always a great opportunity to steal some points. Obviously a disappointing ending tonight.
# Todd McLellan
Put it this way, the start wasn’t what we wanted and if you don’t have any legs, you better have your brains and we didn’t have either. That makes it real tough night, so that’s going to lead to penalties and the penalty kill did not get it done. We had it our tape numerous times to clear and it didn’t come out. With that type of firepower and that type of power play, it’s going to end up in your net, so that’s obviously a concern in tonight’s game. More concerning for me is the back to back and not being able to manage it real well with the mental part of the game. Anticipating where pucks are going to go, covering in the right situations. We didn’t do a good job of managing that.
You know, you have to give Dallas credit they knew that we were playing back to back. I’m sure they weren’t happy with their last performance but they really skated well. They were much quicker, much cleaner than we were and they forced us to play long. We wasted a lot of energy chasing them all over the place. What energy we had and what hockey sense we were willing to use was wasted quite early by chasing them all over the place.
Well, we got a chance our goaltender played well in the first period. We talked about it, we’re down one but we’re still in the game so we’ve got to be thankful for that. I thought when we came out in the second, we got back to probably what we were supposed to be, created a few opportunities, scored on the powerplay but the three goals bang, bang, bang really put a dagger in us. Those are preventable but not tonight.
Well, we decided to go 11 and 7, we wanted to play that. We wanted to get Clarkie into a game and we thought it would be good idea.