There’s a reason they don’t play the games on paper. If so, the Kings would have been leaving San Jose with four points instead of flying home completely empty handed. On Wednesday, LA followed up their 2-1 loss from 48 hours earlier with a 4-2 defeat at the hands of the host San Jose Sharks.
Following the two-game sweep, Kings coach Todd McLellan had the following to say:
On what will stick with him more from this series: high shot totals, or goals allowed off the rush?
Goals allowed without a doubt. That was as poor of rush coverages I’ve seen from our group of D, and our forwards set up some numbered rushes by poor game management. We got impatient. We weren’t scoring, we had some chances, we weren’t scoring, we gotten impatient; they stung us for it. It’s a tough lesson to learn, we just didn’t handle the rush at all, we had some really poor performances back there in that area.
On if this series has highlighted the importance of 5-on-5 scoring
Well, yeah. We’ve been able to be productive on our power play for most of the season. I don’t know what we had tonight, maybe two opportunities, three at the most, and had better looks tonight than we did last night, or the other night. You can’t score every night, it’s impossible, it’s never happened. The 5-on-5 play has to improve. Quite frankly, I think if we defend better, we score three. It’s just the way it goes sometimes, we defended so poor we had to open things up, and they kept scoring. I’m not concerned about our lack of finish around the net, we had a lot of chances, it comes and goes. I’m concerned about our defending and our ability to defend the rush and how we created some of those problems for our back end.
Drew Doughty’s postgame quotes have been published here.
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