Taylor Thinks Best Yet to Come

General Manager Dave Taylor preached patience last month as the Kings struggled to pull themselves out of the Western Conference cellar. They seem to have righted themselves, but he is delivering the same sermon.

Taylor said he is looking forward to the new year, when high-scoring regulars Ziggy Palffy and Mathieu Schneider, along with depth-providing forwards Randy Robitaille and Brad Chartrand, are expected to return from the injured list.

“We’ve still got some ground to make up,” Taylor said from Los Angeles, where he is preparing to leave for the World Junior Hockey Championships starting Tuesday in the Czech Republic. “We dug ourselves quite a hole early in the season, but I’m optimistic because of the way we’ve played the last couple of weeks. We would expect that we’ll be even stronger when we get these injured guys back.”

The general manager said that he has been encouraged by the Kings’ reversal of fortune over the last month, but not surprised by it.

“It’s good to see the team play well,” he said, “but early on in the season--and we said this a few times--we played some real good hockey games that we ended up on the short end of the score. I didn’t think we were playing particularly poorly, but we just weren’t getting any points and weren’t getting the job done.”