Out Not With A Bang, But With A Whimper

The stakes were high going into tonight’s game – if the Kings lost in any fashion they would be statistically eliminated from the playoffs. Hahaha like they had a chance since, well, reasonably October. Shocking that it took 72 games to do it. But with 10 games remaining, they officially mean nothing.

The first was so typically Kings. Do reasonably well for a stretch then immediately after being unable to convert the other team converts the exact same play. And they were doing reasonably well. Outhitting by a wide margin, which has typically been one of their stronger suits this season. Controlling the puck and only allowing small glimpses of Jets action. Then after 11:32 of that, and getting so darn close on a Grade A rebound, the puck ended up down the other end rebounding past Campbell. As if that wasn’t disappointing enough, at 11:54 MacDermid took a penalty. Which the Jets scored on. The goals were 1:05 apart. And they’d only taken 5 shots. That was a downer, and deflated quite a few spirits. Thankfully not Sean Walker, who brought the Kings back to within one two minutes later, when he slapped in Leipsic’s effort past a whole bunch of traffic. The Kings managed to hold it together a little better after that, surviving the first down only 2-1. They did, however, lose 12 of the 16 face offs. Which in the grand scheme of things doesn’t mean much but geez boys, get it together.

They didn’t. While they did have the first shot on goal it took almost 10 minutes and a power play to get another. Half a freaking period where the Kings couldn’t even get a shot off; meanwhile Winnipeg got off 7 in that time. The things we do to our goalies. At least the power play was eventful. Little shoved Kopitar down, leaving Toffoli among others to come to his defense. No penalties but it gave the Kings the momentum or revenge energy they needed. It was of course Brown who scored the equalizer – the only King who’d recognized it was a power play until that point. He wasn’t parked at the net rather a hard angled shot from almost behind the dots. Winnipeg didn’t like it. They got more and more aggressive, culminating in Laine tripping Roy and Meyers retaliating to the penalty by trying to get into it with Leipsic. Both of them went to the penalty box too, Leipsic looking pretty tired of the Jets extra curricular BS. The power play was another ‘oh that’s so Kings and that’s not a good thing’ moments – lots of Grade A chances, final shot rebounds out to Meyers coming out of the box. He has an almost 3 zone uncontested breakaway; he’s joined by Martinez but another Jet and he can’t defend both. Sure enough, he scores less than 5 seconds after getting out of the box. Because of course. Thankfully there was only 3 minutes left in the period and that went by without any further incident.

Iafallo began the third period by trying to upend Meyers; a great choice based on the last period if nothing else, but he ended up on his ass instead. I mean Meyers has easily 6 inches on him. Clifford was much more successful with Beauleiu – he made quick work of him and both made their way to the box for 5 minutes. That was all that the Kings did for 16:10. It literally took that long for them to get a shot on goal. Not sure how they expected to stage a comeback like that, but this season has been like that. They didn’t even bother to pull Campbell with 2:30 left when they puck was solidly in the Jets zone. History has shown it wouldn’t have done much good, but at least some effort was there. But again; this season has been like that.