The Los Angeles Kings are now two games into the preseason, having defeated the Vegas Golden Knights on Wednesday.
Usually for the pluses and minuses serious I start with the pluses, but the big story from last night has to go down as a massive minus.
Minuses:
Drew Doughty’s Injury:
No amount of good can offset your number one defensemen being seriously injured in a preseason game.
It’s a significant blow and the worst case scenario for preseason.
Frank Seravalli has reported Doughty suffered a fractured ankle and is waiting on more imaging to see if there is structural damage.
The true impact of this injury won’t be known until that further imaging is done, but Doughty will miss some significant time which will be devastating from LA.
Pluses:
Alex Turcotte:
It’s back-to-back games with Alex Turcotte going down as a plus and for good reason.
He has been a massive standout in the first two preseason games and was excellent again on Wednesday.
He picked up another power-play point, feeding Alex Laferriere with a nifty pass from the net front.
More importantly, he continues to show how effective his high-IQ, high-motor game works in the NHL.
Turcotte is a master at the “little things” coaches love to go on about.
The angles he takes on forechecks, his position and stick work defensively and him showing off some legitimate offense should be very exciting for Jim Hiller.
As I said after game one, if Turcotte continues to perform this way it will be hard to justify using him as a 4C, and he continued to perform into game two.
Fiala-Byfield-Foegele Line:
The big question mark heading into this game is how the new Kevin Fiala-Quinton Byfield-Warren Foegele line would like.
The answer was a fairly exciting, very good.
They scored but that doesn’t matter much in a preseason game, more importantly, the theory of why that line should work looked good in practice.
Byfield and Foegele’s blend of size and speed opened up a lot of room for Fiala to do what he does best.
That line his a great mix of size, speed and skill and the early signs point to strong chemistry between the three.
The Kings could have a fantastic middle-six line in those three.
Jarred Woolley:
What a fantastic story Jared Woolley has been. He’s gone from Junior B to the NHL in less than a month and looked more than comfortable at the NHL level.
All of the good things the Kings’ scouting staff have said about Woolley were on display.
Big body, good skater for the size and a solid first pass puck-mover.
He didn’t look out of…