Practice 12-4 – Iafallo “available” on trip + Todays Alignment, Edlers Character, Goaltending Overview

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• News post

• Zach Dooley

Back to practice, Insiders. The Kings lined up this morning with some shades of the third period last night, though I didn’t get a look at how the fourth line shook out, with an extra forward.

• Alex Iafallo
• Gabe Vilardi
• Adrian Kempe
• Arthur Kaliyev
• Alex Edler
• Jonathan Quick
• Cal Petersen
• Pheonix Copley

• Todd McLellan

# Todd McLellan

[Alex Iafallo]’s a player we’ve missed, we miss him in a lot of different situations, with and without the puck. He’s a trusting player, an identity player who plays towards the identity most nights.

Play in your own skin, you have to know who you are. If you’re trying to be somebody that you’re not, it’s not a real good situation. You know who you are and you know what you can do, so do it.

I think if we were lucky enough to be in the playoffs starting tomorrow, we would have a good idea of the six that we would want to start and we would run them right into the ground, for lack of a better term, with a seventh and an eighth ready to go. We have a pretty good idea of that, but we’re only 27 games in and we’re to keep everybody on board, because as we saw last year, you never know when you’ll need them.

Those are really hard conversations for a coach, or a group of coaches, to have with a player because of his character. [Alex Edler] wants to be in the lineup, he’s such a respectful player and human being and it stings to take him out, but we also had a plan at the beginning of the year to give him the odd rest. We’re going t0 play seven games in 12 nights, six of them on the road coming up. That’s a lot of hockey for anybody, especially for Alex Edler, but his professionalism is through the roof.

He’s part of our team. We’ve got a really good goaltender in Jonathan Quick, who’s played over 700 games, so somebody to play minutes, good minutes, strong minutes, confident minutes is strong for us. That’s what we think of him, that’s how we’ll use him.

Our goaltending situation is going to be fine. We have three or four really good goaltenders in our organization, starting with Jonathan. [Pheonix Copley], we believe is a tremendously talented goaltender. We went out and we needed to fill that hole in the summer. Obviously [Cal Petersen] is finding his game down there, first start [on Friday] if I’m correct, so he’s got to feel good and confident there. [Matt Villalta], he’s had a good season too. Goaltenders can’t just be evaluated on numbers and I think sometimes that happens. hey have to be evaluated on how they get to the number, how the team allows the number, I’m thinking of goals-against average and save percentage, those types of things. [Yesterday], I didn’t think Jonathan Quick had a bad night at all, yet his numbers won’t show up as outstanding tomorrow, but I don’t think you can pin a single goal on him. That’s how it works in the goaltending position.

# Alex Edler

We talked a little bit about it at the beginning of the season, maybe some back-to-backs like that but you never know. You want to play every game, all defensemen want to play every game. I got to rest and hopefully I’ll be back in soon.

You always want to play every game, you want to be out there, you don’t want to be scratched, but I’m old enough to understand the thoughts behind things too. I’m always ready to play.