FINAL – Kings 3, Sharks 2 (SO) – Anderson-Dolan, Moore, McLellan

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• News post

• Zach Dooley

The LA Kings made it back-to-back shootout wins, with a 3-2 victory over the San Jose Sharks on Saturday evening at Crypto.com Arena.

• Jaret Anderson-Dolan
• Trevor Moore
• Pheonix Copley

• Todd McLellan

# Trevor Moore

I thought that we were alright tonight, it was kind of a neutral-zone game, I guess. They played well, maybe we had a long road trip and all of that stuff, but I thought that we played our game tonight.

It doesn’t matter how it happened, but I think we liked the way that it happened. I think we were consistent and we stuck with it the whole time, we decided to play our game unlike Buffalo and Columbus, where we slipped and tried to do it the wrong way. Shootout wins are shootout wins and we’ll take it.

Yeah, I think we’ve played our fair share of high-scoring games, trying to risk it on offense and we learned that’s not our game. We’ve got to just check our way through games and if that ends up being one-goal games than we’ll take it, but I think we’re going to start scoring more goals playing like that.

I think we want to be more aggressive, we kind of got away from that. When we were rolling last year, we call it pressure versus principles and we want to be pressuring the other team when they’re in trouble. I think we’ve been doing that a little better.

# Todd McLellan

That was not an easy game for us to play. As I said this morning, I didn’t know if this was going to be a road game or a home game. It felt like a road game driving down, I know how I felt, so I can’t imagine how the players felt. The fact that we stuck with it to the end of the night and got pretty good efforts from a lot of players was a real good sign for us.

Really important shift. They had scored, we got a little momentum back, got our forecheck going again, which fell off in the second period I thought and it was a simple goal. We tried to make a lot of hope passes halfway through the game, through the middle of the rink. We finally played North, went to the pads a couple times and JAD found a rebound. It was a timely goal, it got us back on track, evened up the game and it was from our fourth line. There’s a lot of real positives there.

Our penalty kill is not where it needs to be, I think that’s evident when you look at the number itself. Then, we have to break down the root causes of what’s going on. Some are completely in our control, others our bounces and good shots and that type of stuff. I thought tonight, our penalty kill did a good job. Even the goal they scored, they re-attacked the net, had a reboundm we had a chance to clear but we didn’t quite get there but the rest of the night we did a pretty darn good job, really good in overtime. When your special teams aren’t elite, which the penalty kill is not right now, sometimes you lose a little confidence in it but I don’t sense that. I felt like it was there in Boston, I felt like it was there tonight, so that’s a positive

[Pheonix Copley]’s fit in very well which isn’t a surprise. He has experience and carries himself well, guys enjoy being around him and want him to be part of the group. When he’s in the net he looks confident and calm, which can calm things down for all of us. He’s made some really big saves, he’s made some simple easy saves, obviously in the shootout he’s had success back-to-back nights. We have three quality goaltenders in our organizationm they’re all going to have to play at some point. Right now, he’s running hot and we’ll likely keep going there.

Well, this morning we talked about lessons and if we can string some games together. We might get scored on four times in the next whatever it they’re legitimate goals, that they break us down then great, but if we’re gifting goals, wide-open play, high risk, low-reward situational play that comes back to bite us, than we haven’t learned that lesson yet. I think we’re just in the middle of the test right now, I don’t think we can grade the paper one bit.