In Washington Tuesday night, the Los Angeles Kings found themselves in another game where they were unable to generate offense and it cost them two points in a 4-0 loss to the Capitals.
“It’s certainly not the effort we were looking for, not the game we were looking for,” Kings forward Anze Kopitar said. “We all know and realize how important these games are now for us because we’re not standing good in the standings. We’ve got to figure this thing out in a hurry.”
The Caps came into the game having six of seven and not looking very good doing it. Against the Kings they looked like world beaters who put bad habits behind them.
“I think we were getting away with things before that, and that losing streak proved that we can’t get away from the style of game we want to play,” said Capitals goaltender Braden Holtby, who made 27 saves in his career-high 24th win.
“The way we were playing wasn’t our identity. We weren’t making the other teams really earn the wins as much as they should have been.”
The Kings are now 5-11-6 in their 22 games and the club is seemingly unable to flip the switch they so desperately need to do.
“We made two mistakes in the third, turned the puck over on both those goals, but 2-0 I would say is a tough task in this building,” Kings coach Darryl Sutter said. “The first goal is a bad change by a veteran player (Dustin Brown), and the second goal is a bad penalty by a veteran player (Jarret Stoll, tripping).”
It was Washington’s most complete game in the last month with scoring coming from someone other than Alex Ovechkin.
“I was saying that we were getting a lot of production from [Alex Ovechkin] and [Backstrom] and we needed some more from some of the other lines,” said Capitals coach Barry Trotz, who reconfigured his forwards. “When we were going really good earlier in the year, we were getting contributions every night from different lines and there wasn’t a real pattern, just that there was multiple lines contributing. I thought tonight was more of that type of effort where we could have gotten a goal from every line tonight.”
Jonathan Quick made 23 saves in the loss.
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