Just the Facts
- The Time: 9pm EST
- The Place: Crypto.com Arena, Los Angeles, California
- Place to Watch: NESN, ABTV
- Place to Listen: 98.5 The Sports Hub
What happened last Game?
While they started extremely shaky, the Bruins ultimately worked themselves back into the game through the power play and ultimately won a 4-2 game!
Game Preview
So! Boston pulled one out after a rough first 20 against the Ducks, and now must bring their tired selves to Hollywood to face the Kings, who are…really bad!
The Kings are one of two teams left in the NHL who do not have a win yet, and if there’s a reason I could ascribe to it, it is that they are catastrophically unlucky; they’ve played the fewest games of any on the calendar to this point, and aside from losing to the Oilers in a 4-1 beatdown that you’d expect from playing the Oilers this year, the Kings are always struggling to get the tying goal, or if they aren’t, their ability to play an overtime game is conspicuously absent.
It’s not even like they took a major tumble possession-wise; they’re in the lower top 10 of the usual shooting stats but they’re still in the top 10. Where they have fallen quite sharply is in PDO; or the sum of their shooting and save percentage, which as of this writing is dirt worst in the league. This puts them as both a desperate, moribund team trying to find an identity and getting hamstrung by their own rotten luck…and also the perfect trap game for a team riding high off of just barely surviving their southern neighbor.
Boston has done well through their jaunt to California, and while a back to back in LA weather sounds like a breeze, coming out of a game where they had to lean on their power play to get two points and facing a team that is both very rested and where the only thing that’s not working is the final score feels like a perfect opportunity to end up looking down the barrel of a loss. This will almost certainly require them to dig deeper than they have all season, even for an imperfect team, to overcome Artemi Panarin and his merry band of old men.
Can they do it? Let’s find out tonight!