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Hard Luck loss in Anaheim |
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The Los Angeles Kings losing streak increased to six games after they lost to the Anaheim Ducks on Friday night.
After an evenly matched first two periods, the Ducks were able to win the third period by getting goals from Adam Henrique and Ryan Kesler to take the game.
Alex Iafallo scored the lone goal for the Kings, which gave them a chance to win it.
“I thought we played hard tonight, but we’ve got to squeeze a little more out of the offensive zone,” said John Stevens after the game. “We had time in the zone and they allowed the puck to stay on the wall, and did a good job of getting in the lanes.”
The first two periods were intense, evenly matched periods. Both teams had ample opportunities to draw first blood but either a post or a goal line save stopped it from happening.
In the third period, Anaheim scored early in a fluky way when the puck went to Henrique behind the net and then the momentum of him carrying the puck to the net happened to find its into the net. The goal is not one that you can fault the goaltender or the defense, it’s just something that happens in a game.
Two minutes after that, Iafallo crashed the net, gobbled up the rebound and put the puck past John Gibson to tie the game.
The way the game was going, overtime was on everybody’s minds but just past the midway part of the third period, the puck came out to Francois Beauchemin at the point, who fired it on net. Kesler was able to change the direction of the puck just slightly to get it past Jonathan Quick to ice the game for the Ducks.
“I think we played hard tonight, we played the right way,” said Stevens. “The only thing I’d like to see is get to the net more. A game like this, where they get a couple of power plays to get momentum, and we had one that wasn’t very productive, so we have some work to do there.”
Since goal scoring has dried up for the Kings, the power play has come under more scrutiny. Right now the Kings are in the bottom third of the league, ranking 22nd with a 16.8% of converting on the power play. That is one spot better than the Ducks who are in 23rd with a 16.7% conversion rate.
The Kings penalty kill has been top notch this year but as Stevens described on Thursday, if you’re always playing catch up, you tend to use more energy.
Quick had a solid bounce back game where he looked like his Vezina self. He stopped 29 of 31 shots on net and really had to stand on his head in this game. Now that the Kings have fallen out of the playoff picture for the moment, it was interesting to see Quick play in back-to-back games. It shows how important these divisional games are.
The Freeway Faceoff series is now tied at two and the deciding game won’t be played until March 30, the fourth last game of the season. If the Kings want that game to mean something, they will need to pick up their play in order to keep pace.
Currently, the Kings are two points back of the Colorado Avalanche for the last Wild Card spot and one point behind the San Jose Sharks for the third spot in the Pacific Division. It is important to keep pace as much as possible because with the amount of three point games down the stretch, it will be hard to gain ground no matter how many points they are behind.
Coming up next the Kings will host the New York Rangers in a rematch of the 2014 Stanley Cup Final on Sunday. The Rangers lost to the Avalanche on Saturday and will be on the back end of a back-to-back. This means LA might see Ondrej Pavelec instead of Henrik Lundqvist. New York is 5-4-0 in January and are fighting for their playoff lives themselves in a competitive Metropolitan Division.
Los Angeles Kings Blogger • 
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