gave his reaction<\/a> to the media yesterday after the late-collapse of a loss for the Kings in the final two frames in the second and third periods vs. the Ducks on home ice, by a score of 3-2. <\/p>\nThe Kings need a change of motivation to get something changed in the standings in the Pacific Division in the West this regular season. <\/p>\n
Here’s a look at everything Hiller said to the media postgame following the Kings’ crumbling 3-2 shootout loss to the Ducks in the Pacific Division on home ice on Friday night (Jan. 16). <\/p>\n
Jim Hiller<\/p>\n
On if the Kings can feel good enough about getting one point in the standings in the West<\/p>\n
“That\u2019s not good enough. No, we\u2019re there. No question. We\u2019ve been there for a while, really.”<\/p>\n
On how Joel Armia impacted the game for the Kings yesterday<\/p>\n
“He sticks out to me. His hockey sense, his strength, you saw the penalty kill, he gets a breakaway. So those are things we\u2019ve missed for sure. I was glad to see, I didn\u2019t expect to play him, I think he played 15 minutes, but he was going pretty good. He\u2019s an important player for us. I think you if you didn\u2019t think about it before, I think it was pretty clear tonight the difference he can make in a lineup.”<\/p>\n
On how the momentum shifted after the strong first period in the opening frame<\/p>\n
“It was when they scored after we scored, right? Which is a cardinal sin in ice hockey. You don\u2019t give them one up late, last minute, first minute, not on the bump up shift after you score, because obviously it gets them back in the game when you have a chance to really step on them and kill their momentum. What did I see there? I mean, we made some mistakes. <\/p>\n
I talked about our mistakes were coming down, tonight we made way too many mistakes. We turned the puck over way too often. We had a bad line change, we got caught in the wrong side of it in the neutral zone, their defenseman jump active. So the last seven, eight minutes of the second period, I think that were four or five odd-man rushes, which generally are hard to get against us. So, that was the issue with tonight\u2019s game.”<\/p>\n
On the Kings not holding leads in the middle frame in the second period in the West<\/p>\n
“We have to lock that down. We still have to push, and we\u2019ll get our chances. Somebody said we created a lot of chances in the first half of the game. We\u2019ll still get our chances. But for me, and maybe it\u2019s the lack of scoring up until this point this year, we\u2019re still one foot on the gas, one on the break, and we got ourselves caught in between, like I said, four or five times for odd-man rushes. We just can\u2019t do that. We\u2019re not going to outscore those mistakes, and when you try to just do it that way, and then then you give up too many and now, you\u2019re in a you\u2019re in a seesaw battle.”<\/p>\n
On the missed opportunities offensively yesterday vs. the Ducks<\/p>\n
“We had opportunities, Laf on the two-on-one in overtime. Very similar situation. In hindsight, if he sauces over the stick and Juice one times in the net, we\u2019re talking about what a great pass. But in hindsight, you got an opportunity like that, you probably want to just pull the trigger. And we had other opportunities during the game, Koozie came down the slot a couple of times. There were others that that we didn\u2019t take. We can\u2019t cut it too fine. We have to take the opportunities when we\u2019re presented with them.”<\/p>\n
On playing the same team in back-to-back games this weekend in the home-and-home series vs. Anaheim<\/p>\n
“It’s pretty simple for us. We’ll watch it. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. We’ll see the seven or eight minutes of the game that slipped away from us and exactly why we have to clean that up. We just can’t do that. <\/p>\n
We like large parts about our game, but we didn’t deserve it because of those moments. We could have came in here and won the game and I would have still been very disappointed with that stretch of hockey because that’s not the type of hockey that’s going to allow us to win or give us the best chance to win.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A momentum spark offensively in the opening frame in the first period for Quinton Byfield and the Los…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":138474,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164],"class_list":["post-138473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138473","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=138473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138473\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}