{"id":110840,"date":"2025-12-28T07:02:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-28T07:02:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/110840\/"},"modified":"2025-12-28T07:02:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-28T07:02:07","slug":"ducks-not-even-close-to-good-enough-in-6-1-loss-to-kings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/110840\/","title":{"rendered":"Ducks “not even close to good enough” in 6-1 loss to Kings"},"content":{"rendered":"

LOS ANGELES \u2013 For the third time in a month, despite the declarations that it wouldn\u2019t happen again, the Anaheim Ducks<\/a> were, in their own words, \u201cunacceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coming off the four-day Christmas break, the Ducks were simply not up to speed, as the rival Los Angeles Kings bulldozed Anaheim early with a 4-0 first period in a 6-1 victory on Saturday at Crypto.com Arena.<\/p>\n

Mason McTavish scored the lone goal by breaking a power play drought in the second period. Luk\u00e1\u0161 Dost\u00e1l stopped 24 of 30 shots.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe’re not happy with this, obviously,\u201d Alex Killorn said. \u201cThe first period was really tough. Obviously, after a break, like we had, we gotta be a little bit more professional about how we start this game. When you go down to a team like that, who’s defensively very sound. It’s really hard to get back into the game.\u201d<\/p>\n

Los Angeles outshot Anaheim, 17-7, in the first period, and despite the Ducks\u2019 pushback with a 12-1 shot advantage in the second period, they weren\u2019t able to claw back against the stout Kings front.<\/p>\n

\u201cTonight, we’re dreaming the way we started that you could really come back,\u201d Ducks coach Joel Quenneville said, \u201cwith when they were pressing and playing the way they were. It was like we hadn’t played in a long time, and it was very evident that they were the hungrier team, and they sent the tone right from the get go.\u201d<\/p>\n

With a point picked up by Vegas (17-8-11, 45 points) in a shootout loss against Colorado, the Ducks (21-15-2, 44 points) slipped to second-place in the Pacific Division, and Vegas still has two games in hand on Anaheim.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Los Angeles (16-12-9, 41 points) inched closer in a wild card spot to Anaheim and Edmonton (19-14-6, 44 points) in the division race. San Jose (18-17-3, 39 points) rounds out the Western wild card spots.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we all clearly know that this isn’t good enough,\u201d McTavish said, \u201cand when we had these kind of off games, we know it’s all not acceptable, and we know we have to come out the next game and really prove to ourselves that we can play with the top teams in the league and beat them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anaheim next hosts San Jose on Monday.<\/p>\n

Anaheim\u2019s slow starts have not been solved, and Saturday\u2019s was the slowest of the season so far.<\/p>\n

Not only did the Kings outshoot and outscore the Ducks heavily in the first 10 minutes\u20143-0 lead on a 14-3 shots-on-goal advantage\u2013en route to a 4-0 lead after the first period, but Los Angeles was beating Anaheim in all areas of the ice.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn’t have the readiness,\u201d Quenneville said. \u201cHow we prepared it over four days. Whatever we did or didn’t do, it was evident that being ready to play is a priority, and that didn’t happen. So we were disappointed and I\u2019ll take full responsibility for that.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Kings were winning board battles. They got inside position at the net. The normally slower, older Kings beat the normally faster, younger Ducks back on the rush.<\/p>\n

Even after Ducks coach Joel Quenneville called his timeout after the Kings second goal just four minutes into the game to try and wake up his team, L.A. continued to get the better of their Orange County rivals.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou give up four goals, you’re obviously not doing everything right,\u201d McTavish said. \u201cWhether it’s pace, just rustiness, I don’t know what it was, but obviously it’s unacceptable, and it shouldn’t happen again.\u201d<\/p>\n

With the four goals allowed in the first period, the Ducks leapfrogged to second in the NHL in first-period goals allowed\u201343, just one behind San Jose, which allowed one itself on Saturday.<\/p>\n

Anaheim is now tied for first in the NHL in games allowing the first goal with a 9-13-2 record in those 24 games. Ducks are conversely 12-2 when scoring first.<\/p>\n

Where the first period has been a hole most nights for the Ducks, the second period has been better, and Saturday\u2019s provided the smallest ray of sunshine through the SoCal rainstorm.<\/p>\n

Anaheim outshot the Kings, 12-1, in the period and finally broke through on the power play to put in the Ducks\u2019 49th second-period goal, which tied Colorado for second-most in the NHL.<\/p>\n

On the Ducks\u2019 second power play of the game, Beckett Sennecke deflected a puck just wide of a half-empty cage, but the 19-year-old rookie was tenacious in following up the chance behind the net.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He sent the puck in front, where Leo Carlsson dug for it under Kings goaltender Anton Forsberg, but it was Mason McTavish who zeroed in on the loose puck to pot it home for the Ducks\u2019 lone goal of the night and first power play goal in six games.<\/p>\n

\u201cGood puck movement,\u201d McTavish said. \u201cGuys going to the net, which is always a good sign on a power play.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anaheim was 0-for-13 with the extra man in the last four-plus games, 1-for-21 in the last eight-plus games, 3-for-40 in the last 13-plus games, and 6-for-63 over the last 22-plus games.<\/p>\n

In the 15 games prior to that last mark\u2013the first 15 games of the season\u2013the Ducks scored 14 goals on 59 power plays.<\/p>\n

Saturday was just the fifth time this season the Ducks have had consecutive losses. Anaheim is now 10-5-1 in games following a loss.<\/p>\n

Typically, the Ducks have been quite adept at responding to defeats, and aside from one three-game skid, the losses have not morphed into fully fledged losing streaks. It\u2019s an impressive part of the Ducks\u2019 mindset that Killorn echoed at Saturday\u2019s morning skate.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have enjoyed the way the team kind of reacts to a bad game,\u201d Killorn said earlier in the day, \u201cwhich is great, which might have not been the case always in the past. But at the beginning of the year, when we get on those runs where you can get eight games in a row, I’m not saying that we have to do that every time, but kind of string a couple together. Those points are so huge going forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

While there was the four-day Christmas break in between games, where the players and coaches got away from the rink for a bit to reset and enjoy their family life, the loss in Los Angeles still marked the first consecutive losses in two weeks and the second in the last six weeks.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe got another game coming up in a couple days,\u201d Killorn said postgame, \u201cbut like I said, this team has been pretty resilient in the fact that when we have had a bad game, we bounce back with a good one. We just kind of have to build a couple good games in a row instead of just going switching one back and forth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Quenneville said the coaching staff will reconvene, reset and prepare for the next game on Monday in making sure that this type of game didn\u2019t happen again, because through all the muck of the Kings game on Saturday, one thing was clear.\u201cThis is not even close to being good enough,\u201d Quenneville said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LOS ANGELES \u2013 For the third time in a month, despite the declarations that it wouldn\u2019t happen again,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":110841,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[4855,163,824,165,164,43202,401,38179,1719,26720,1706,1721,9095,100,404,1722],"class_list":["post-110840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-alex-killorn","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-ducks","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news","tag-freeway-faceoff","tag-hockey","tag-hockey-fights-cancer","tag-joel-quenneville","tag-la-kings","tag-los-angeles-kings","tag-mason-mctavish","tag-mighty-ducks","tag-news","tag-nhl","tag-tst-los-angeles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110840\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}