Monday night’s game vs the Red Wings was not a ‘trap game’ for the Los Angeles Kings.
A match-up with Detroit is a measuring stick, a barometer…and it doesn’t matter if the game is played the first week of the season or in the final month.
After a horrible November the Kings were hot in December, punctuated by a 5-0 shutout of the ‘Wings in Detroit.
Well, the Kings came up short in the re-match a few days ago, something defenseman Willie Mitchell had an interesting take on yesterday afternoon…
MM: You were pretty open about your disappointment with the Islander game, are there similar feelings coming off the loss to Detroit considering how well the team has been playing lately?
WM: Well, we played great against Detroit. I will sit there over and over again – I think the guys played excellent for two periods. Excellent for two periods. We dominated that hockey game and we were down 3-1 and then they scored a power play (goal) to make it 4-1. We controlled the play, we did everything. They got a couple of bounces the other way. But, we dictated that hockey game. In this league when you get down 4-1 against a good team like Detroit, it’s natural when there’s only twenty minutes left for everyone to just loose a little bit of interest and I think that’s what happened, obviously, to make it go up to 7-1. The team lost interest because the game kinda got away, even though I think there was a lot of disappointment in the room because we played hard and we played well for the first two periods.
I’ll have reaction to those statements from coach Terry Murray and Ryan Smyth up soon.
[update: their responses are available here]
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