Sleeksays

LA Kings (10-11-3) vs. Edmonton Oilers (11-11-2) 7:30 PST, Fox Sports West To recap: Sean O'Donnell takes a boneheaded penalty and giftwraps a goal for the other team? Right back on the ice. Dustin Brown takes a bad penalty with the team already down a man? Right back on the ice. Alex Frolov misses an assignment and costs the team a goal? Benched for the rest of the game (despite the fact that the team is down a goal and Fro leads the team in goals) , swathed in the red jersey of the 4th liner, and forced into a one-on-one meeting with Terry Murray. That's kind of fucked up. That's like suspending the straight-A kid for talking out of turn. I hope he wasn't sad, that would break my heart. The Kings haven't been scoring recently, with pretty much all the scoring coming from the Stoll-Handzus-Frolov line. Brownitar has been absent from view since Kyle Calder re-joined their line (I think I should have another line naming contest: Used Condom seems appropri...

You know, I probably come up with a hundred different line combinations between games, and yet Terry Murray always manages to come up with a line that completely blows my mind. The Frolov-Stoll-Handzus line is one such line, and yet it's different from the others because it doesn't make me want to kill someone. The line is actually pretty awesome. All three can play defense very well, all three can put the puck in the net, and all three can play heavy minutes. The line did a fairly good job at shutting down Patrick Kane when they were out there (he got a goal off a line change and an assist on the power play) and contributed 2 goals themselves. If the Kings are going to heavily rely on 2 lines like they have been, they might as well put their best players (and Kyle Calder*) on those lines. *I'm actually kind of worried about Calder. My brother was at the game yesterday and reported that people were actively decrying Calder's existence, and there were shouts of, ...

Los Angeles Kings (1-2, meh) vs. Carolina Hurricanes (2-1, 4 pts) 7:30 PST, FSN West, FSN South Do me a favor: reach into my pants. No, in the front. Do you feel that? No, that's my phone. Left. Yeah, right there. That's a boner. That's what Frolov playing defense does to me. Hey, shut up, we can't all be Dustin Brown. You know what, forget it, just get out of there. The point is, I'm very excited by this pronouncement by Terry Murray that Alex Frolov will skate with Michal Handzus on the prime defensive line for the Kings. The traditional NHL line is that you have to have 2 scoring lines, a checking line and then a goon line. Look at the Ducks for an example of this and see how well this works. The reality, however, is that guys aren't either good at offense or good at defense; guys can be good at both and they can suck at both. There are guys like Sammy Pahlsson, who's great at defense but couldn't score if you put a passed out coed i...