With a blank slate, Kings focused on replicating second-half success on the penalty kill
# With a blank slate, Kings focused on replicating second-half success on the penalty kill
# Contributors
# Players
# Staff
# Summary
Through six games last season, the LA Kings sat 31st in the NHL in penalty kill percentage, having conceded seven goals from their first six games of the season. A 7-3 October loss in St. Louis saw the Blues tally four power-play goals in one game and after a four-game road trip, the Kings sat barely over 50 percent on the penalty kill, which set a difficult hurdle to come back from.
# Notes and Quotes
I know everybody looks at the standings and they go well, they’re 31st and what’s kind of interesting for me last year is that we got off to a terrible start and when you get tapped for four in one game, it’s hard to recover. No one wrote that they jumped from 31st to 22nd at the end of the year and that is pretty impressive, it’s a credit to them. It doesn’t happen all the time. – Trent Yawney
We’ve looked at in segments, you take a 20-game segment and look at how you’re doing as a unit. Obviously, that one game kind of wrecked everything we had, but if you block it off into different chunks, we had a good penalty kill at times throughout the rest of the year. As much as it’s a full number, there’s ups and downs, peaks and valleys. It’s trying to analyze how you’re doing in your 10, 20 game segments and kind of go from there. – Mikey Anderson
Honestly, shorthanded goals are like a cherry on top, that’s not really the standard. Yanwns has been preaching for the last couple of years that we want to be aggressive and we want to go chase down pucks and make it hard on their team. Shorthanded goals are a product of that, so I think that his structure gives you opportunities but keeping the puck out of the net is the most important. – Trevor Moore
If you take last year, I [remember] all of them, but they were turning points in some of those games. We did get bit a couple times thinking that we had a scoring opportunity that ended up in the back of our net, so you don’t want to coach the offense out of them on the PK but remind them that killing the penalty is the priority and anything after that is a bonus. Staying aggressive, that’s kind of our word, to just stay aggressive when the opportunity does provide itself whether it’s on the killing side, the defensive side or we get the offensive opportunity to take advantage of it. – Trent Yawney
Pretty much everyone’s back, so we have an idea of what we want to do. It’s kind of just going over it in the room again, talking about it and watching video, but until you go through it and kill some penalties, you’re just trying to get back into it and then find the right ways to do it. I think communication and trying to kind of readdress everything we’ve talked about the past couple years is key. – Mikey Anderson
We’re hoping to find some new players, guys that maybe you don’t think are going to be penalty killers. You put them in situations and they take advantage of an opportunity and when you’re not dressing your full lineup, you have that that option. Todd has tried to work some different guys through, who were here last year but haven’t really been put [on the PK] in a game situation. These exhibition games provide that and it’s good to see how they react in a practice versus a game because it is different. – Trent Yawney
We kind of dug ourselves a hole last year and it took us close to the whole season to try and come out of it. Our numbers weren’t really where we wanted them to be, so I think a goal of ours is to start off really well on the penalty kill. I take a lot of pride in that and I think boosting our numbers by at least a couple of percentage points is a good goal. – Blake Lizotte