In Tempe, Trevor Moore scored a double for the visiting Los Angeles Kings in a 4-1 win over the Coyotes on Monday night.
Moore and Anze Kopitar put the Kings up 2-0 in the opening stanza.
“We’re a veteran team, we don’t have a lot of rookies,” Los Angeles coach Todd McLellan said. “We’ve been together as a group for a long time. We understand what our structure is. All of those things are really important on the road. We seem to play a simpler game and everybody pulls on the rope the right way. We don’t need outstanding games from everybody every night, we just need good games and we’ve been getting them.”
The win was LA’s eighth straight road win to open the season.
Moore scored a shorthanded goal at 3:36 to get the 1-0 lead, Kopitar scored at 8:20 for the 2-0 advantage after 20 minutes.
The Kings improved to 11-3-3.
“They were a tired group, and they were trying to get off the ice, and when tired you make some [bad] plays, and I was able to knock it down and put it in,” Moore said.
Pheonix Copley made 30 saves in the decision.
Moore hit his double in the middle frame, at 15:31, after a turnover for a 3-0 lead.
Arizona dropped to 8-8-2.
“We had our looks, but obviously you don’t want to try to come from behind [with] a team like that,” Arizona’s Sean Durzi said. “That’s a team that’s going to make you pay for your mistakes.”
Lawson Crouse scored with 65 seconds left in the second period to trim the deficit to 3-1.
“I think we played solid defensively, offensively we generated a lot of chances, we just did not bury them,” Arizona coach Andre Tourigny said. “They played like a veteran team in the third and it was tough to generate much.”
LA’s Phillip Danault scored at 16:15 of the third for the 4-1 final.
“We wanted to get a good effort from the group so they could play well in front of him and get him back to where he needed to be,” McLellan said. “All the work he did leading into the game was really important.”
Connor Ingram made 21 saves in the loss.
The Coyotes were scoreless in six power play chances.
“For the most part we were keeping them to the outside,” Arizona’s Logan Cooley said. “They didn’t get a whole lot of stuff inside. When they got shots, we were there to clean up the rebounds. When they were having those pushes, we kept them off the board and that and kind of killed their momentum.
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