Rob Blakes Media Availability – Full Video + Notes on Defense, Trades, Clarke, Byfield, Schedule

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• News post

• Zach Dooley

Yesterday morning, Kings General Manager Rob Blake addressed the media on a variety of topics, following a day on which he addressed the team and a day on which goaltender Cal Petersen was placed on waivers and eventually assigned to the AHL to get steady game action.

• Cal Petersen
• Brandt Clarke
• Quinton Byfield
• Jacob Moverare
• Jordan Spence
• Tobias Bjornfot

• Rob Blake

# Rob Blake

I don’t think we’re going to trade just to do something. We’re constantly looking at different solutions to try to go back to the consistency level, we’ve got to find that.

The idea in the American League was to get some games for Brandt Clarke. Obviously with the World Juniors coming up, we have a decision to make here within the next few days. We’ve had calls, multiple calls, with Hockey Canada discussing that and Brandt included. We travel I think on Monday, back to Ottawa and Toronto in that area when Hockey Canada’s camp would start up, so we’ll have a look at those things there for next week.

Quinton Byfield’s been good, going to a few games live in the past week and everything, I think on the offensive side of things, you see a little bit of that production and handling the more minutes and everything. It is a spot where he can work on a lot of aspects of his game in multiple minutes down there.

No, I wouldn’t say we’re too offensive, there is a balance there, I think we would like a little more offense out of our defense at times, I’m not sure we’re too offensive-minded.

I think part of our inconsistency is mistakes at tough times, not just defense, overall team play. I think last year, our team structure defensively was very good by the end of the year and I think that we’re still capable of getting that level.

[Jacob Moverare] got in for a game or two, [Jordan Spence] was up for a short period of time there the last couple of days and back down and now [Tobias Bjornfot]’s back in that mix. We’ll see how the lineup shakes out, but those guys have been doing a real good job in Ontario. Part of the reason we move them around a little bit is that we don’t want any of them sitting for an extended period of time. So, you can bring one up as a seventh D for two or three weeks, but I’m not sure it was the right thing when we had the ability to put them down and play games.

Well, there’s things we’re looking at it. For sure, we’ve played a lot of games, practice time has been limited in between that. We haven’t played as many back-to-backs or situations that we would have last year, so that adds another game where you may have had a practice day instead of playing the two games, but everybody’s dealing with scheduling. We have maybe three more games or four more games than the least played in the league, so not a big discrepancy. We’ve started Tuesday instead of Thursday, which increased the one more game than other teams.