LOS ANGELES — The Kings will head into their three-day Christmas break on a high note, handling the Calgary Flames 5-3 at Crypto.com Arena on Saturday.
“We were talking in the coach’s room that tonight was a good win for us,” said head coach Todd McLellan. “It was a tough, hard game. It didn’t go necessarily the way we wanted it to the whole night, but we won.”
Needing to regroup after a 2-1 loss to Seattle at home on Wed., the Kings wasted no time against the nearest opponent chasing them in the Pacific Division standings, jumping ahead 61 seconds after the puck dropped.
In the Flames zone, Anze Kopitar won a draw against Elias Lindholm. Defenseman Drew Doughty fed the puck to Quinton Byfield, who struck a slap shot from straight away as Adrien Kempe screened the Calgary netminder.
The dirty work gave the puck a chance to sneak under Calgary goalkeeper Jacob Markstrom’s pads for the first of Byfield’s two goals on the night.
Calgary quickly retaliated.
Cam Talbot was well positioned but Rasmus Andersson’s wrist shot from the right wing knuckled off defender Matt Roy’s left skate, finding the back of the net after glancing off the top of the Kings goaltender’s glove.
After the Seattle loss, McLellan criticized his team’s effort on the power play, saying his group “moved like turtles.”
Pierre Luc-Dubois’s sixth finish of the year at the 15:20 mark, his first in a month, won’t count as a power-play goal, but Calgary didn’t have a chance to get back to full strength as his high tip-in scored just as the Kings man-advantage came to an end.
During a two-minute power play for tripping, Kings skaters buzzed around the net, putting Markstrom under pressure until Dubois’s stick got in the way of a Jordan Spence slap shot from the blue line.
As far as the Kings coach was concerned it was a “really good power play goal.”
Attempting to find their winning form at home, the Kings rushed at Calgary’s net to start the second period.
Surviving several dangerous chances, the Flames managed to equalize despite being down a man at 16:48.
This is where McLellan again took issue with his team’s power play performance.
“It was 2-1 and all of a sudden it’s 2-2 and the game is different,” he said. “We were able to recover from it but we need to be sharper.”
The goal scorer, Calgary’s Blake Coleman, should not have surprised anyone. No player in the NHL has scored more shorthanded goals in December — for the team leading the league in that stat.
Coleman’s fourth shorthander this month, 4:01 into the period, came after picking up the puck in the neutral zone when Spence dropped it off to no one in particular.
Linking with Yegor Sharangovich for a two-on-one, Coleman steamrolled Talbot as he finished the Flames’ league-best ninth goal down a man.
Talbot’s mask was ripped off and his neck twisted in a direction it wasn’t designed for, but he remained on the ice for the rest of the game despite feeling soreness in his upper back.
The Kings soon regained control when Doughty bounced a cross-ice pass toward the net as Alex Laferriere snuck in behind Calgary defenders.
Laferriere didn’t know much about his fifth goal of the season, which found the net off his skate.
“Obviously that was a pretty lucky bounce but those happen once in a while and I’ll take it for sure,” Laferriere said.
After killing a penalty against Doughty, the Kings went up 4-2 midway through the second when their leading scorer, Trevor Moore, collected his 16th.
Moore received the puck at the blue line, charged toward the right circle and roofed a slap shot past Markstrom on the stick side.
A dominant factor for the Kings on the road with 10 goals away from Crypto.com Arena, Moore’s goal held up as the game-winner for the Kings, which was forced to defend on the penalty kill much of the rest of the way.
The Kings were tasked with killing a four-minute minor against Adrian Kempe, and did so without a problem.
But the Flames (14-15-5) inched back into the game when it found a power play finish against the second-best penalty-killing team in the league.
Coleman tallied his second goal of the game, giving him 12 on the season, cleaning up a rebound off a Talbot save with just under 13 minutes to go.
The Kings (19-7-4) stayed strong through the conclusion, punctuating the Christmas Eve eve result with an empty-net goal off a bookend finish from Byfield, his 10th, with one minute to go.
“I felt early in the year we were winning some games where we didn’t have a lot of adversity in them,” McLellan said. “Wasn’t a lot of situations where you’re biting your nails and that type of stuff. Some of these games are good for us. It reminds us how hard it is to win.”
