Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down Kings
- Updated: January 7, 2019
Happy New Year Kings fans! It’s already been quite the week, two ruddy awful games and one milestone reaching game to finish it off. Also, it rained in LA. What even is that??
Thumbs Up: Milestones
Kopitar got his 300th goal (then admitted he thought he’d get to that milestone earlier – lol Kopitar a lot of us did.) He’s now 5th in franchise history for goals (behind Robitaille, Dionne, Taylor, and Nicholls – now that’s a list.) He’s also 5th in assists behind Dionne, Gretzky, Taylor, and Robitaille, and 5th in points. Brown played his 1078th game, the second most of any Kings player in franchise history. (He almost scored in it too – those offside reviews are killing me.) And then there’s Jonathan Quick.
51st shutout. (Sure it was only 16 shots but that’s not what counts.)
300 wins. 17th player in NHL history to reach this milestone, and 11th fastest.
In franchise history, Quick has played the most games (575, Vachon comes closest with 389.) He’s also won the most by a long shot – 300 to Vachon’s 171. His average is 0.52 to Vachon’s 0.44. He’s also got 19 more shutouts.
Two more franchise records Quick holds: his GAA is the best at 2.30 and his save percentage is best at 0.916.
Thumbs up: Campbell
https://twitter.com/i/status/1080321177220870145
Holy cow what a game he had against Vegas. Sure the Kings lost but absolutely none of that was on Jack Campbell’s shoulders. He did everyone one can expect a goalie to do. He made timely saves. He made key saves. He made spectacular saves. And he made mundane saves that are just as important. He was the backbone of the team that night and every single other player on the ice needs to apologize for their efforts in front of him. Being a backup, especially to a player like Quick whom the organization will play at every opportunity, is not easy. He has to be ready despite not getting many chances to perfect his craft in an actual game situation, and he has rarely let the team down. Certainly not this week. 46 saves on 47 shots. That’s impressive.
Thumbs Down: Offense/Empty Nets
In the two games in which the Kings struggled offense was their biggest issue. Jack Campbell stood on his head for us and his teammates couldn’t even gift him with a goal. That’s all it would have taken to force overtime. Instead, they pulled Campbell and Vegas scored an empty net goal. Please, please, please if you’re going to do that, put in place a better strategy. This should be a whole separate practice or covered in every practice. How to defend against an empty net goal and how to maximize chances of offense with a sixth attacker. It’s not the same as a power play, it’s a whole different arrangement of bodies and needs to be executed as such. But I digress. In the second period of that game, it took the Kings almost 18 minutes to get a shot on goal. For a professional NHL team that should be unacceptable. Now if your shots on goal are low but you’re getting in quality chances, fine. The Kings are not. Gosh, I’m sounding like a broken record, aren’t I? But when you’re not fixing issues that have been plaguing all season, they’re bound to keep coming up. Tampa is a good team. They’re the best for a reason, and that was on stark display Thursday. The Kings couldn’t generate a chance to save their lives. Their forwards looked lost and boxed out, they couldn’t get out of the neutral zone and were thoroughly outplayed. Look at the game tape, look at what Tampa did right and strive for that. Look at every place where they had the upper hand on puck control and discover why you couldn’t keep it. Look at the shots you did finally get off, and see why that wasn’t effective. Learn to pick a spot better. Make those one-timers count if that’s all you’re going to get. Tampa made it look easy.
It may look like this Kings did more good this week than bad, but the problem with that is every time the Kings have one good game, they have trouble continuing that. The last two weeks of December they managed to string 6 wins together in a row – the first time they’d done more than 2 in a row all season. Then they tanked the next 2. So while I’m happy to write about how great the Edmonton game made them look, I’m fully aware it’s probably a once off. And consistency is something I’d like to be able to write about more.
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