Trevor Moore scores twice as Kings extend road win streak by beating Coyotes
Trevor Moore scored two goals and the Kings extended their season-opening road winning streak to eight games with a 4-1 victory over the Arizona Coyotes on Monday.
Anze Kopitar and Phillip Danault also scored and Pheonix Copley made 30 saves for the Kings, who are tied for the third-longest such streak in NHL history. Buffalo holds the record by winning its first 10 road games in 2006-07.
“We are a veteran team,” Kings coach Todd McLellan said. “We have been together as a group for a long time. We understand what our structure is. Our game management skills have gotten better from the start of the year until now.
“All of those things are really important when you play on the road. We seem to play a simpler game. Everybody pulls on the rope the right way. We don’t need outstanding games from everybody every night. We just need good games, and we’ve been getting them.”
As the Kings work to improve their 1-3-3 home record, they need stronger leadership from Pierre-Luc Dubois. When he’s out of sync, the team struggles.
Lawson Crouse scored and Connor Ingram made 21 saves for the Coyotes, who played their seventh home game of the season. Ingram is 6-2 in his eight starts this season.
The Kings are 9-1-2 in their last 12 games after sweeping the three-game season series against the Coyotes.
Playing on the fifth anniversary of coach Todd McLellan’s hiring, the Kings scored the first three goals and are 8-0-1 when scoring first this season.
The Kings killed all six penalties, including a double minor on Adrian Kempe when the score was 3-1 midway through the third period. The Kings have not given up a power-play goal in the last seven games and 26 penalty-kill situations.
“First, we are blocking a lot of shots,” Copley said. “We’re taking away lanes. I thought we did a really good job keeping them to the outside. We’ve been sticking to keeping it simple, and that was has been leading to the success.”
Copley gave up three goals in the first 8:31 before being pulled in the Kings’ 5-4 victory here Oct. 27, and McLellan said the Kings targeted this game for his return. Cam Talbot had started the last three and eight of the last 10.
“In the back of our minds we were always thinking about playing him here again,” McLellan said. “Back to the scene of the crime. But not his crime. Our crime. Try to get the players to respond to him and he to them.”
Moore scored a short-handed goal at 3:36 of the first period. Danault picked up a pass that ricocheted off Moore’s skate and returned it to Moore, who picked it up along the center side boards and skated in from the wing to beat Ingram with a wrist shot high to the glove side.
“Todd put a pretty big emphasis on our start and we wanted to be better,” Moore said.
Kopitar made it 2-0 five minutes later when he took a nifty backhand pass from Quinton Byfield and found an open side of the net. Kopitar has four goals and six points in the last four games against the Coyotes.
Copley saved breakaway chances by Jason Zucker and Nick Schmaltz in the final nine minutes of the first period, and Crouse missed the net on a breakaway in the last minute.
“We played solid defensively,” Coyotes coach Andre Tourigny said. “Even offensively, we created a lot of chances but did not bury them. We did a lot of good things. It was just a matter of execution.”
