LA Kings coach Terry Murray talks Johnson’s hit on Ribeiro

Following up on the last post, here’s what Kings coach Terry Murray had to say about the hit Jack Johnson put on Mike Ribeiro just seconds before Steve Ott scored the game winning goal the other night…

“Could there be another time and another place? Maybe. If you slow the video down…you see a four-on-two coming. Kopi had fallen down and Loktionov is too deep – he should have been higher, he should have been at the depth of Kopitar. He probably would have been able to break the play up. I don’t want to take that away from (Johnson’s) game though. I like the fact that he’s playing with that type of an attitude against better players on the opposition. There’s a time and a place for everything. Could he have pulled it back a little bit and read the situation of four-on-two, (and thought) ‘I can’t do it right now’? Maybe. But, it happened.”

Would you rather he take out Ribeiro in that situation and then take your chances with Steve Ott at the other end of the ice?

“We can over analyze this part too. If we’re going to get down to very specific parts of that play, what happened before that? Let’s go back to when Kopi was at the offensive blue line. He broke up their break out and he goes in on the attack. There’s all kind of things you can look at. You wish he would have shot the puck or kept it deep or not over handle it. He’s surrounded, he has two guys on him, he falls down. Loktionov was too deep in the zone. There’s all kind of things you can break it down into specifically, if you want to be looking at it from the negative side of things. But, it’s a hockey play. Everybody was playing hockey and the puck ended up in our net.”

If you missed Johnson’s explanation for his hit on Ribeiro, click here.

More soon, including Murray’s thoughts on Ethan Moreau’s recent play.

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