Kings and Blues players talk another one-goal game, LA wins 3-2

Post-game quotes from both locker rooms following the LA Kings 3-2 win over the visiting St. Louis Blues on Monday night…

– Jake Muzzin on defending home ice: “Home ice is important. We’ve got to create a better identity for ourselves at home, play a little stronger, win more games at home and make it a tough building for teams to come in and play. Tonight was a good test for us and we answered.”

– Muzzin on the rivalry with Anaheim (their next opponent): “I mean, they’re a rival, but personally I don’t look at it as a rivalry. We want to win every game and play hard every game. We’ve got to continue winning games to stay in the playoff hunt and get home ice advantage. Tomorrow is a big test.”

– Ben Scrivens on the overall game: “I think we tried to approach it with a bit more focus. Just attention to detail. We know they’ve got an extremely potent power play. I think they’re second in the league in offensive production and they don’t give much up either. So we knew we had our work cut out for us. It was just a matter of focusing on what we had to do and executing our game plan.”

– Scrivens on preparing for Anaheim tomorrow: ‘We’ve got to get home, fuel up, eat right and get a good night sleep. Same mental process and everything that we did today. We’ll try and replicate that tomorrow. That’s the challenge of playing in this league. You’re going to have back to backs against tough teams so that’s a good challenge and measuring stick for us.”

– Blues captain David Backes on getting down early: “We showed character in the third by pushing back a little bit but at some point we need to learn our lesson that if you give good teams leads it’s a heck of an uphill climb to try and get back in the game and try to get a lead again.”

– Backes on the Blues tough road trip: “I think it’s a mindset in general, whether you’re at home or on the road, we have to bring our best game and lets build that lead like we have done in a few instances and see if the other team can climb out of a hole rather than the opposite happening like we have done in the past few games.”

– Blues defenseman Kevin Shattenkirk on getting back into the game: “We really have to look in the mirror and teams go up 3-0 or 4-0 on us and it’s easy for them to kind of take a step back and we’re a good enough team that we can get back in games but when you play two teams like this they wake up eventually and it’s too hard to get back in the swing of things.”

– Blues coach Ken Hitchcock on preventing the losses from becoming a trend: “Well I think the trend is we had slow starts. Both games outplayed significantly in the first period, out competed, not ready for the tempo. So that is our responsibilities as players and coaches, we have to get ready for the tempo of the game. I thought, again, that we revved it up half way through the hockey game. We can’t play like that. The scores is 3-0, I don’t think you can judge the game by its 3-0 score, who knows how much they let their foot off the accelerator. To me, it’s ready at the start, ready to compete at the start, ready to fight for space. They took it to us.”

– Hitchcock on his team seeming out of sync: “Yeah they force you. They’re a physical, hard checking team. We’ve got to have a better reaction than we did. We got to regroup when we get home, and get ready to go again.”

We also have brand new comments from Blues forward Brenden Morrow up on the site. He spoke with MayorsManor about trying to fit in after leaving Dallas and shares some interesting opinions on Kings captain Dustin Brown. See the article link down below.

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