Like all NHL teams, the LA Kings have to face their nemesis at some point during the season; in fact, several times. Who is that? Why, the Edmonton Oilers, of course. The teams played the first of four contests for the year on Saturday in LA, with eyes looking back towards the playoffs of last spring and forward to the ones to come in a few months.
Taking the long view, the Kings have been thinking about the Oilers since at least last spring, when they were dumped in the playoffs for the third year running by the team which would eventually go on to lose game seven of the Stanley Cup Final to Florida.
GM Rob Blake shortly acquired Tanner Jeannot for a more gritty style of play. Add in Warren Foegele, and you have, in quick order, a team that is proverbially “harder to play against.” This, it is supposed, will stand them well in the playoffs this season, and most especially if round one brings the two teams into contest yet again. Blake must have been especially gratified to see the preview on display when the Oilers turned up for the first game of their in-season matchups.
What are the Oilers, in turn, thinking? Probably about Vegas, or Colorado, or whoever they might be playing from the East Coast teams come the late, and last, round of the post-season. But on this Saturday, the obstacle in their way was a surprisingly resilient Kings squad.
The Kings came in one point below the Oilers, with the respective records like this: Kings, 19-10-5; Oilers, 21-11-2. The Kings are coming off a seven-game road trip on which they went 3-3-2, including losing the last two games of the seven.
But now at home for five games, they would rely on their excellent 10-2-1 record at the former Staples Center to propel them to a hoped-for win. Coming in, this was second-best at home in the NHL by points percentage. Question was, would they do it by grit or by skill?
The gritty approach was working early, with a lot of play in the LA end, but nothing much ending up at the Kings’ net. Then a breakdown (in the form of a careless rebound) by Darcy Kuemper that found its way directly onto the stick of Kasperi Kapanen, who put it into the open side of the net. 1-0 Oilers.
The Oilers then followed this up, oddly enough, with a run of play where at least three times in the first period between the ten-to-go and five-to-go marks, they surrendered the entire middle of the ice. This would pay off in one goal for LA, where Quinton Byfield came all the way down the ice to grab a puck off the right-side back wall, came out of the corner with the puck, and did what the Kings sometimes seldom do—he looked shot first, and he flung a puck up and over goalie Stuart Skinner.
After the game, Byfield was to say, “I think our line was being simple. We got the pucks behind them, and we shot as many as we could.” The line came up big, with the stats looking like this by the end: Byfield 2-1-3, Foegele 1-2-3, Jeannot 1 goal.
The Kings would end period one having scored once more and leading 2-1.
You could call this second tally a gritty goal, if you wanted to. Foegele got it by reaching behind him to tip a puck that had just hit a defenseman’s leg pad. It was nothing planned, but it worked. Was this the formula the Kings needed?
Yes and no, when you find out that the Oilers ended period two having scored two goals to lead 3-2. This despite the Kings twice having near-breakaway chances, first by Alex Turcotte and next by Jeannot. Neither player was quite quick enough to recognize the space he had, so sure-thing chances turned into odd-man rushes, which were thwarted.
If there was an LA highlight in period two, it was in the play in total of Kevin Fiala, who was all over the ice, including missing an early period chance where he marched a puck across the crease right-to-left but didn’t get a shot away. Towards the end of the period, he did it again, holding the puck again across the crease and flipping it wide.
So how did the Oilers end up up 3-2? The third goal was a dead giveaway by Vladislav Gavrikov in his own end. Draisaitl tipped it to Vasily Podkolzin, who put it to returning former King Arvidsson, who scored.
The message was perhaps that grit can take you only so far in the face of skill. But wait. The game is three periods long. Sometimes, it’s longer than that.
Period three, as if to validate the claims shared about Jeannot, saw that player score with 2:32 gone, assists going to Foegele and Jordan Spence. It was off a rush, where Foegele took the puck across the blue line, spotted Spence, and passed to him in the right slot. He did a shot-pass to the crease for Jeannot to redirect past Skinner. In an ironice reversal, this was not grit; it was skill.
The game ended regulation 3-3, despite the Oilers dominating play in the LA end in the last five minutes. Time after time, they set up on the right-side hash marks, only to throw a puck into traffic net-front and see it come back out again. You might say that gritty defense won out in regulation.
OT saw Byfield get his second of the day to give the Kings a 4-3 win. All the scoring, thus, came from the combo of Byfield-Foegele-Jeannot. Grit wins, skillfully.
The OT winner came when Byfield ripped a puck past Skinner from 20 feet, a play in the mid slot that begged him not to pass. He said afterwards that he was seeing shot more as of late. He put this into perspective: “Coming to camp, I felt really confident. The first couple of games were my best. [Now] I’m just kind of finding it back again, confident with the puck, taking guys one-on-one.”
He added that playing with someone reliable and consistent like Foegele is also helping his game.
Foegele was also effusive with his comments. “We’ve [his line] been using our speed the last couple of games, and using our size, wearing them down. It’s a pretty simple recipe, but we’ve just been sticking with it. Credit to the guys for playing the right way,” He said of the Kings team as a whole that the recipe for success was “guys back checking and guys blocking shots.” Sounds like grit to me.
Kings’ coach Jim Hiller put the capper on the day, saying, “We have a solid team with a lot of unique players. That line [Byfield et al] is tenacious. It is the best game they’ve played all year.”
Notes
Brian Kennedy is a member of the PHWA and the author of a number of hockey books, including Growing Up Hockey,
