The Need to Knows
- The Time: 7pm PST
- The Place: Climate Pledge Arena in Beautiful Seattle, Washington
- Place to Watch: TNT, truTV, HBO MAX, SportsNet
- Place to Listen: KJR 93.3-FM
Game Preview
Los Angeles is a real funky team.
The Kings after a solid month of struggling to figure out what the little black thing zipping around on the ice is supposed to do has blossomed into an offensive juggernaut coming into December; though not without a few hiccups along the way. They’ve blown out Chicago…and also been dragged into a 2-1 slugfest loss with them. They boast wins over Utah and losses over Washington in roughly the same span of time. To them, it barely matters, because they’ve finally managed to start translating their near suffocating control of the puck back into on-ice results; headlined by the fresh young talents of…let me just check my notes here…
Adrian Kempe and Kevin Fiala. Both leading the team in scoring with 10 goals apiece. I guess being near-30 has it’s perks in Hollywood these days.
Of course, this team of Black and Silver that’s surging in on two hard-fought wins shows up right on time for the Kraken, for whom it seems the hockey gods have strung along just enough to build hope and then punish them for a lot of the stuff they haven’t been doing since the beginning of the year. In a truly cruel twist, the minute they’ve actually started to try and control games as opposed to letting the game happen at them, the results haven’t been there for them.
With Schwartz and now Berkly Catton on injured reserve, those issues are just compounding themselves; the good is being pulled off the roster by no fault of their own (again) and those who are left are struggling (again). If there is an area in which the Kraken can find themselves a win, it’s probably through locking down their defensive effort; especially in the middle of the ice. While the Wild game ended in heartbreak, the score is kind of misleading; they played a reasonably competent game defensively and kept up. Bringing that kind of effort to this game, especially to this team of all teams, would be a great first step in both stymying their attack, but also giving them a chance to potentially counterattack, where the Kings haven’t been exactly perfect defending.
Of course, if the Kraken show up with their 3rds on, we can effectively write this game off too, which would be such a drag.
LET’S GO KRAKEN, LET’S GO SQUIDS