Devil of a Time

Oh Kings, you just don’t like to make things easy on yourself, do you?

The first period made me angry. Physically shaking kind of angry. If I told you the Kings had 4 power play opportunities, including 58 seconds of 5-on-3, no penalties themselves, and outshot the Devils 19-4, shot attempts 40-12,  what would you guess the score would be after 20 minutes? 2-0 seems right, right? Sure, but you’d expect the Kings to have the pair of goals. Oh no. No, the Devils came out with the goals, one shorthanded on our second power play. Shaking angry. For the first 19 seconds, I was fooled into thinking it wouldn’t be the typical afternoon game. That the Kings would realize how damn tight the playoff race is right now and come out strong. They had 2 shots in the first 19 seconds and in the first 5 minutes outhit the Devils 7-1. 5:54 in the had their first power play. 25 seconds after it ended they had another. I didn’t think it was possible to have a worse man advantage that the first but sure enough that’s when the puck bounced over Drew Doughty‘s stick and onto Grabner’s, who scored on his shorthanded breakaway. (Once again playing from behind. Again!) The Kings followed it up with a second pathetic goal, one that bounced between Quick’s blocker and his leg, possibly due to Derek Forbert’s inability to pick him up. That’s when the next penalty turned into 58 scones of a two-man advantage and it was clear if the Kings didn’t score then, they weren’t going to. As the shots racked up, the score didn’t. It wasn’t even that the Kings didn’t have good chances – they did. Great chances. Curse of the backup? Curse of the afternoon game? It was baffling. And infuriating.

The second was only better because the Devils didn’t score. But for no other reason. Their first shot came almost four minutes in yet the Kings couldn’t capitalize on those four minutes of just their zone. In fact, the Devils almost made it 3-0 with a weird bounce by an open net instead. Quick ended up making some spectacular saves but unlike how he bails us out all the time, no he down the other end was bailing him out. Instead, the Kings took 3 penalties, 2 from Paul LaDue and one literally 2 seconds after LaDue’s first expired. Miles Wood fell on Quick 15 seconds into that one so it ended up being mostly 4-on-4. Brown tried a couple of shorthanded attempts to no avail. And the Kings ended the period on a power play bit again, COULDN’T SCORE. They’d won 60.5% of faceoffs too by his point in the game so they had possession. Just nothing to show for it. The third period didn’t get any better. History said is perhaps should have – the Kings do have the best 3rd-period goal differential in the league. 6:06 in it took a slight hit and if the Kings were out of the game before, they sure were now. Sometime later Toffoli got a penalty so we had to suffer through that, and with 1:19 remaining they pulled Quick. But really the Kings were done when they couldn’t get any traction on the 5-on-3 in the first. Maybe they were done before that when the Devils put in their backup. Or even before that when the league scheduled the game at 1 pm. But that’s not what matters – they are now only in the playoffs because they hold the tiebreaker over the Ducks. With 10 games left, this was not the time to spiral down. Inconsistency isn’t appropriate anymore. Oh, Kings, what are we going to do with you?