Lineup notes - depth skill sustaining leagues offensive surge - Fiala has a”a good feeling” about tonight

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• News post

• Jon Rosen

Best to you and yours, and once again, stay dry. The Kings and Wild meet for the second of their three meetings (7:30 pm / ESPN+ / Hulu / LA Kings Audio Network) and first since the five-alarm fire at Xcel Energy Center last month. It’s also the first of back-to-back ESPN-broadcast games, and it was a pleasure to see the wonderful Linda Cohn at today’s morning skate. Steve Levy and Ray Ferraro will also be on the call. Fun broadcast ahead.

• Jonathan Quick
• Drew Doughty
• Kevin Fiala

• Todd McLellan

# Todd McLellan

there’s a lot of things our team has to do to help our goaltenders.

It doesn’t matter where they come from. Gabe’s chance the other night would be considered low-danger. It was outside, it was on the goal line. But that type of chance is high danger. It’s unexpected, it’s quick, it gets people off-guard. So, when we look at things from an analytic perspective, those things are predictable. Sometimes they’re easier to read and react to if you’re the last line of defense, whether it’s a goaltender or a defenseman or whoever might be back there. … Mooresy’s goal the other day. Just thinking in that game alone, I could think about Arvy getting up and slinging the puck to the net, a Quick touch at the net. Is that high danger? Maybe. It started out as very low-danger. Gabe’s chance. Very low-danger. But it can help the other way. So, we try and eliminate as much as we possibly can all over the rink.

I just think every year there’s more and more skill that comes into the league, the young players that are filling some of those roles are built differently than the players who used to fill those roles. If you think about the traditional third and fourth line back when I entered in the league, it’s significantly different now. You’ve got high-end first round draft picks playing on third and fourth lines with a tremendous skill set. Your bottom pair D, your 6-foot-7 tough bruising defenseman, not a lot of teams have those guys anymore. They can be a 5-foot-10 puck-moving offensive wizard. The whole make-up of the roster and the skill development of the players changed over years, and that’s why all four lines can be dangerous, your fifth and sixth D-men can be offensive players. They weren’t that in the past.

There is a league standard based on all of the skill on the fourth lines, and it’s the average or the mean in the league, and you’d like to be at that point or above it – with your power play, with your penalty kill, goals-for, goals-against, taking penalties drawn – you want to be above it.

# Kevin Fiala

Just get a good sweat, get some touches, get some shots in you. I have some good feeling for tonight.

He celebrates all the time. Two-on-ones, if he breaks it down, it’s always fun to play against him in practice. It’s all about fun, you know? It makes it more fun to come to the rink and battle against him.