Kings giveth, and Toronto taketh away
- Updated: February 25, 2018
Hallelujah, the long-awaited drought is over. No, I’m not talking about the Kings securing a playoff spot, or even scoring the first goal rather than giving it up. (Neither of those things happened.) But the chances of those things happening we hope drastically improved with the return of Jeff Carter. With Anze Kopitar scoring 35% of the Kings goals this season they desperately needed a second line with some firepower, something we all hoped That 70’s Line could provide with papa bear healthy once more. (Spoiler alert: it did.)
More happened in the first 10 minutes of this game that happened in the entire Dallas game Thursday. 51 seconds in the Kings gave up a goal. Because of course, they did. In 60 games, they have given up the first goal 39 times. Anyone else disturbed by that statistic? Yeah… It wouldn’t have been that bad. Except for the rest of the period. Yes Carter was back and yes Dion Phaneuf almost there down with an Oiler because he tried to mess with Carter, and yes the Kings had the first official power play (the Oilers goal came on a delayed penalty), and yes Milan Lucic, Tanner Pearson and Connor McDavid all collided at the Kings blue line leaving McDavid hurt for a couple of shifts… Wait what was my point? Oh yes, the Kings can’t score. Andre Sekera got an early penalty (if you’re counting that’s the third ex-King to make something interesting happen, Michael Cammalleri got his first assist on the goal and we hadn’t even played 2 minutes.) Tyler Toffoli has been so snake bitten as of late (he now has 20 goals and 15 assists, in comparison Kopitar has 25 goals and 40 assists) he couldn’t even score front door all alone on a power play. 6:46 in Adrien Kempe spent 2 minutes in the penalty box himself, but with 44 seconds remaining in that it became 4-on-4, and then came the worst part of the period. The Kings had 5-on-3 for 1:07. You’d think that would be a good thing. Except it was so pathetic Drew Doughty looked like someone in the ECHL. For someone with the 2nd best plus/minus in the league, he wasn’t helping add to that total today. He passed the puck to no one (seriously you have two more players on the ice how do you pass to no-one??) and then iced the puck. Iced it. On a freaking power play. Their continued scoring woes continued into 5-on-5 play and left everyone wondering – why can’t the Kings play 60 full minutes of hockey? By the end of the first, they’d gone 4 full periods without a goal.
Adrien Kempe opened the second by taking a penalty, which the Oilers didn’t score on but sure enough a neutral zone turnover from Doughty (he did not have the best night, to say the least) left Cammalleri and Draisaitl alone in the Kings zone for a kind of 2-on-1 but really 2 vs. Quick and not even our Jedi could stop it. 2-0 Oilers. The Kings tried everything to get momentum back – Carter leveled a guy in the same spot Pearson/Lucic leveled McDavid; it even knocked his helmet off but I was more worried about Carter being okay because he’s just come back and nooooo the Kings cannot afford to lose him again! Even monitoring his minutes he still managed 17:36 of ice time, and while he was tentative his presence did life the team. We all knew that with Carter back it was only a matter of time before Toffoli scored, and that time was 14:26 into the second period. Oh, those are the scoring hands I’ve missed so. What a deke then backhand to get past Cam Talbot! (Huge thanks to newbie Thompson who had the primary assist, several good clean hits and lots of hustle.) Life again! Oh, wait no, because 2:38 later we gave up another. Going into the third would have been so much easier 2-1 but the Kings don’t like things being easy apparently.
The third period took a while to get off the ground because apparently the Kings also don’t like playing 60 minutes of hockey. Sorry, do I sound frustrated? Just wait. I’ll say it right now whatever objectivity I try to write with will be gone when we get to the final minute of the game. In order to get to that point, Tobias Reider had to score to bring the Kings to within 1, just to give us some hope. His wrister came 7:51 into the frame, which gave us enough time to build a comeback. Said comeback came after another setback (the Kings don’t like to make things easy!) – pulling Quick with 90 or so seconds remaining just served to give Cammalleri a third assist (why did we let him go again?) on the empty net goal and fans thought they were done. The Kings didn’t though because with 18 seconds left Dustin Brown tipped in Doughty’s beautiful blast from the point bringing them up to 4-3. 18 seconds? Yeah, that’s just enough time to be frustrated about losing a 1 goal game. The clock ticked down and sure enough, the Kings lost. BUT WAIT! There’s more! Players weren’t leaving the ice, and the refs were talking to Toronto. The jumbotron was giving plenty of looks at what turned out to be a puck crossing the goal line! Holy cow the Kings had managed to tie the game with 2 goals in 9 seconds. I mean this is the team that manages to win a game with 0.11 seconds left on the clock to 18 seconds remaining to get 2 goals? No problem! Problem. Edmonton challenged the goal for goaltender interference. And here’s where I’m going to get mad. Sure, the Kings wasted opportunities and it shouldn’t have gotten to this point, but they did build a successful comeback. It was thrilling! It was everything you’d want from a hockey game, especially one that will impact the playoffs. And it was all taken away. The league doesn’t have any clear idea what goaltender interference is because their calls are so inconsistent even the players and coaches don’t understand it. Literally. Talbot has gone on record cursing the league’s inconsistency in the calls, and Stevens said “I think the league is so confused that I’m confused. They don’t know what it is, so how the hell are we supposed to know what it is?” This game will be one to look back at come April and the standings are where they are.
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