The Los Angeles Kings finally enjoyed some home cooking in their last outing.
Now the Kings will look for another helping when they host the two-time defending Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers on Thursday night.
The Kings not only snapped a modest two-game skid with a 3-0 victory over the Winnipeg Jets on Tuesday, but they recorded their first home win of the season after losing the first five clashes.
“I’ll take any win,” Los Angeles coach Jim Hiller said. “I think we played to our identity, and you have to start there. You can’t come off that, because then you get in all kinds of trouble. We’re going to start scoring more, I really believe that. We got some really good looks again.”
The Kings are in the league’s bottom third offensively and near the middle defensively, but the win over Winnipeg gives them something to build on ahead of the four-game homestand finale that precedes a six-game road trip.
Against the Jets, it was a 1-0 game until the final five minutes before the Kings pulled away. The capper was Drew Doughty’s goal that sealed the victory and also made him the franchise’s all-time leading goal scorer among defensemen. Doughty’s tally was the 162nd of his career, moving him past Rob Blake.
“It feels special for sure. It’s a huge honor,” Doughty said. “I looked up to Rob Blake as a young boy being an L.A. Kings’ fan. When you come into the league, it’s never something you even think of. So it’s kind of shocking that this all happened.”
The Panthers arrived in Los Angeles after Tuesday’s humbling 7-3 loss to the Anaheim Ducks to open a four-game trip. Florida held a 3-2 lead late in the second period before surrendering five unanswered goals.
“We played well enough to be in it, but it’s not really well enough and up to our standards,” forward Noah Gregor said. “So some stuff we got to work on.”
It has been a rough start for the Panthers, who have only one win in six games away from South Florida and entered Wednesday tied for last in the Eastern Conference.
Granted, the Panthers are without two star forwards in captain Aleksander Barkov and Matthew Tkachuk, and a clutch defenseman in Dmitry Kulikov, but nobody in the league is feeling sorry for them.
“Everybody has factors that they deal with at the start of each year,” coach Paul Maurice said.
All the Panthers can do is keep grinding and hope to find traction with the players who are healthy enough to have an impact and work their way out of their current win-one, lose-one stretch.
Offensively, the Panthers are 25th in average goals per game at 2.54. One of the few saving graces is the continued production from veteran Brad Marchand, who scored in Anaheim. In his 17th NHL season, the 37-year-old is leading the Panthers with seven goals and 13 points.
–Field Level Media
