Someone needs to tell Sutter that more speed is needed in transition. So pilons like Schultz and Greene are not the solution for that. They need to skate faster blah, blah. They will not, because they can not.
The puck moves faster than any player. It's not that the Kings didn't skate fast last night, it's that they didn't skate period. The legs weren't moving. Most of them were gliding. In the home opener after a 6 month rest because they missed the playoffs. Standing around on the PP. Not going to the net, which makes blocking shots that much easier. It might as well have been game 83 of last year.
That's what frustrates me about Kopitar. He is a great player, but he refuses to shoot.
The crazy thing is that we've been saying that for his entire career, except now he's actually not shooting. For all the non-shooting over his career, he always ended up somewhere in the top 3 or 4, if not 1st, on the team in total shots, and shots per game. Last year he was 10th on the team. He averaged fewer shots per game than Lewis.
Trading all those first round picks for short term rentals is going to bite us in the ass. I think everyone is clued in on that, and it's frustrating because Dean spoke out against that early on in his time here.
Dean has been making a series of terrible moves since the last cup win. Just stick to what got us there in the first place. The other thing is that we have a serious void of leadership. jW is gone, Stolly gone, Mike Richards gone and then a talented player like VV is gone. Some of these guys need to step up or this will be a long season like last years.
Well he spoke out against that when they hadn't won 2 Cups. It's one thing to build a team, and another to try and stay on top. I have no problem with trading the 1st round picks because it's Cup or bust, and year to year at this point. It doesn't matter how many 1st round pick the Kings have, it's most likely never going to be as good as 2012-2014, and maybe this year if things work out, again. The confluence of everything that came together at the right time is not something that is easy to find. The Canadiens, Oilers, Islanders, Avs, Stars, Devils, and even the Wings and Penguins know that. None of them have had the same success since their glory days.
Leadership, yeah, they've lost a lot of guys the last little while. At the same time, did Stoll, Williams, Regehr, or Richards help last year? Did they ever help turn the key?
I like the idea of looking at the season in 5 game segments. You get 16 of them during the year, so it's like a NFL schedule, which can keep things in perspective. Even better in baseball, which has so many games that 1 or 2 can't kill a season. If you get 6 out of every 10 points, that puts you at 96 for the season. That's good enough to put you in the race. There's the 2 extra games, and if you win those, there's 100 points. So they've got 4 more chances to not be the equivalent of 0-1 in an NFL season.