Practice 12-21 – Short Skate Today + How Consistent Is Consistent, THAT Goal, Forever A King

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• News post

• Zach Dooley

On the middle day of a 3-in-4, the Kings hit the ice today for a relatively short skate at Toyota Sports Performance Center in El Segundo. Coming off of a 4-1 win over Anaheim last night, the Kings were on the ice for around 25 minutes today, getting things moving and by 11:30 it was only Brendan Lemieux, who continues to work his way back to health off of a lower-body injury, who remained on the ice for extra work.

• Brendan Lemieux
• Carl Grundstrom
• Sean Walker
• Kevin Fiala
• Alex Iafallo
• Adrian Kempe

• Todd McLellan

# Todd McLellan

[Brendan Lemieux] is going to be coming back, [Carl Grundstrom] is a hell of a player and he’s not even in our lineup right now and [Sean Walker] should be in there. There’s competition and that should drive a team. We hope we have that.

It’s a good question, I don’t know the answer right now. Some teams, they just finally get it and they show up as the same group every night. It doesn’t always go your way, it might look inconsistent but it’s not by intent. I’m not sure of the answer with our group, because I’ve thought we at some point grasped consistency, but then we give it back.

I don’t know if we’re at that turning point, but maybe we’ll look back a few months from now and we’ll call it that. It was a very, very strange game in my opinion. We played about as well as we could in the first period and a half for sure, then we started to take penalties, we got impatient and a good offensive team made us pay. It was just bang-bang-bang, it was like we got slapped six times and we didn’t know what hit us, but maybe that is the turning point, maybe we realized that enough is enough, let’s go. We’ll see, but we don’t know that yet.

I think that’s complete control of [Kevin Fiala’s] body, because your edges and your attachment to the ice has to be strong, you’re off balance, your hands have to be positioned right, you have to reach and elevate a puck effectively while you’re doing all this. The whole package was involved in one play, that’s pretty strong, including the mind, so that’s what I meant in this situation.

# Kevin Fiala

I just tried to make a play and thankfully it worked out.

# Alex Iafallo

Yeah, it was unreal. [Kevin Fiala] can protect the puck very well and fend off guys like that with his arms and he still has the puck. That’s definitely really good.

# Adrian Kempe

[Kevin Fiala]’s really strong on the puck and he’s really good on his edges. When you’re good on your edges, you’re stronger than people think you are because you get a lot of power just from having that ability. It doesn’t matter where your skates are, you can still find the strength somehow and he’s really good on his edges and that’s a good thing to have.

Just trying to keep control of the puck at the same time, it’s a hard thing to do. The fact that [Kevin Fiala] stayed on his feet I think was the most impressive thing and then the move, it was an impressive goal.