My dog is following us around today making plaintive Chewbacca noises. He’s doing this because even though we left him in the care of someone he knows and loves, we’d been gone for three whole days and it reminded him of the time his first family tied him up outside a shelter and left him once and for all. It was a long, anxious night for him, disturbing and painful and confusing all at once. I bring this up because I just finished watching that horrid Vancouver game and well, I can relate. My Chewbacca isn’t as good, though. Raaaaahhhrh.
Not good enough, Kings. Not. Good. At. All.
The most persistent area of weakness has of course been
the power play, and Terry Murray has decided he’s going to fix it with Alexei Ponikarovsky. Man, I feel for him. He was a perfectly suitable 20-goal scorer who was slated from the get-go to be our replacement Frolov on the third line. Now TM seems to have turned him into a checker. I know he didn’t recover form after that ankle injury terribly fast, but I also don’t think the 4th line is where he belongs, and there have been times I wonder what in the heck is going on when he gets scratched even after a good game in favor of Kevin freaking Westgarth. As of now TM’s favor smiles upon him, but who knows if it will have a half-life of seven games or seventeen seconds.
In other words, I don’t know how he’ll fix it, or even if Poni will even stay on the PP for more than one go, but it would serve me right if they go on a tear tonight and score three times. Yes, do that. Show me. Poni could sure use it.
As for Dallas? Well, they’re on a 4-game win streak. With Brad Richards out, others have stepped up. Goalie Kari Lehtonen (.915 SV%, 2.61 GAA), finally healthy, keeps them in it. Loui Eriksson has 23 goals and 61 points. Jamie Benn, just 21 years old, has 3 goals in his last 3 games. They had so many talented young wingers (I wonder what that’s like?) that they traded one away for Alex Goligoski, lately of the Penguins. He has been putting up points while also logging heavy minutes each night.
Bernier (and his .943 SV% in his last eight starts) is back in net for LA. Please score goals for him again, Kings. And insert 4-point-game stuff we’ve been saying since December here!