PRESEASON FINAL – Kings 2, Golden Knights 1 OT – Fiala, Copley, McLellan
# PRESEASON FINAL – Kings 2, Golden Knights 1 OT – Fiala, Copley, McLellan
# Contributors
# Players
# Staff
# Summary
The LA Kings went to overtime for the second straight night in the preseason but came away with their first victory, a 2-1 win over the Vegas Golden Knights on Monday evening at T-Mobile Arena.
# Notes and Quotes
# Pheonix Copley
It was good, it was a battle, I got to get some game situation stuff in, which gets ramped up during camp but you don’t really get that kind of game situation stuff until you’re in a game. It was good to get my feet wet and now on to the next one.
A lot of it is traffic stuff, guys are driving to the net, trying to get in your way so you can’t see and obviously the intensity gets ramped up in these games. I’d say the intensity and traffic are the two biggest things that kind of changed from summer skates and the scrimmages in camp.
Yeah, I mean I knew I was going in at some point a second [period] so just 10 minutes earlier, it is what it is, just a little sooner than I thought. At the same time, it’s kind of just “I’ve got to get in there and do my thing.”
Yeah, definitely, that’s part of the job, you have to be ready when that happens and you have to go in and you’re there for the team. That’s just part of the gig.
# Todd McLellan
I think tonight was an easier game for us to evaluate. We got to see more players in common situations. Penalty kill and power play, those are situations where the bench gets shortened and we haven’t had any work on them yet. 5-on-5, we did some good things, we did some things that we’ve actually worked on poorly, so we have to fix some areas of our game. Still, it’s back-to-back in the exhibition season, game two, there’s things we can be happy with and then there’s part of the game that we have to fix.
Well, he doesn’t need many opportunities, I don’t think, to score. He had very few chances, yet he scored a goal and set up a nice one in overtime. Obviously the offensive instincts are there. I think it’s going to take them some time to gel as a line and figure each other out, figure out how we’re going to play the game as a group. It won’t be any different than Phil Danault when he arrived last year, it took him four or five games just to figure everything out, but we’re excited about having him here and he seems to be fitting in real well.
Well, you draw a few things on the board, you show a few video clips and you hope that it works. That’s why training camp is two weeks long and then you get some practice time to begin the season. We’ve got a practice, then we play on Wednesday again, so we’ll try and add an element to our game tomorrow that skate. That could very well be a piece of either the power play or the penalty kill and see if we can implement it on Wednesday.
Phoenix knew he was going in today, we were going to split the night as it was and after the first, Cal didn’t feel real good. He went in and knowing you’re going in at that point may give you a better chance to prepare even. He loosened up, he got ready between periods and when he went in, I thought he played very well in the last 40 minutes.
He felt something and instead of pushing him through it, it makes no sense. We’ll evaluate him and we’ll see where he is tomorrow.