Warren Foegele also scored, and Joel Edmundson had two assists for Los Angeles, which had lost its past three games (0-1-2). Darcy Kuemper made 27 saves.
“We have so much confidence when he’s in the net,” Clarke said of Kuemper, who is 5-1-1 in his past seven games. “There’s some situations where, like, it almost seems like it’s a bigger breakdown that it looks like. But just because he’s so calm and makes the routine save, like, it doesn’t even get brought up. We’re so grateful to have him, and, yeah, he’s our backbone, and he killed it tonight.”
Fabian Zetterlund scored, and Leevi Merilainen made 20 saves for the Senators (11-7-4), who had won the first two games of a seven-game road trip.
“I mean, some nights the puck doesn’t go in,” Zetterlund said. “We’re trying to keep our game tight, you know, and play our game. And we have another team on the ice that we’re facing, and they do a good job, too. So, I mean, some nights are tougher than others.”
The Kings took a 1-0 lead at 5:31 of the third. Edmundson started off a clean end-to-end breakout that ended with Joel Armia feeding Foegele at the left post with a backdoor pass.
“It was two incredible passes,” Foegele said. “My only job was just to beat my guy, and I thought I could do that, and fortunate that it went in.”
It was Foegele’s third goal in his past seven games. He had one goal in his first 11 games of the season.
“I thought the two players who really jumped out at me tonight were [Foegele] and Phil Danault,” Hiller said. “I thought those guys really had impactful games. Penalty kill, playing against (Tim) Stutzle’s line. … They haven’t probably felt as good about their game as they’d like to. They were really important for us tonight.”