The Ducks will host their annual Black Friday matinee this afternoon at Honda Center, this year facing off with the rival Los Angeles Kings.
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Anaheim will look to snap its four-game winless skid with a victory over its arch rivals, and in the finale of a four-game homestand that’s seen narrow defeats to St. Louis, Florida and Montreal.
“I honestly liked our third period, we had a lot of chances,” Mason McTavish said of the setback Wednesday vs. Montreal. “I thought [John Gibson] was great, too. It’s just the way it goes, there’s a lot of games and you can’t get too down on yourself and hopefully we get out of this little losing streak.”
McTavish scored twice in the loss, his ninth and 10th goals of the season. He leads all NHLers age 20-or-younger in scoring this season, and has now collected four points in his last two games.
Anaheim will hope to flip the script early in today’s game on a frustrating recent trend, as the loss to Montreal marked the fifth straight game the Ducks have conceded night’s opening goal. Anaheim is 5-2-0 this season when scoring first but just 4-8-0 after trailing 1-0.
“We've got good fight in our team and we feel like we're never out of it, but we need to find ways to get off to better starts so that we don't rely on the comeback mentality in the third period,” Cam Fowler said. “It's nice that it's there, we continue to fight, but it's hard to sustain that throughout the course of a year. So, we have to find ways to build leads and get off to better starts.”
The Ducks will conclude the holiday homestand with the season’s first Freeway Face-Off, shooting to hand the Kings their first road defeat of the season.
The Kings extended that road winning streak to eight games on Monday with a 4-1 win in Arizona, getting two goals from winger Trevor Moore and 30 saves from backup netminder Pheonix Copley.
The win made LA the fourth team in NHL history with at least eight consecutive road wins to start a season, joining the 2006-07 Buffalo Sabres (10), 2009-10 New Jersey Devils (nine) and 2018-19 Nashville Predators (eight).
“We're a veteran team, we don't have a lot of rookies,” Los Angeles coach Todd McLellan told NHL.com’s Alan Robinson. “We've been together as a group for a long time. We understand what our structure is. All of those things are really important on the road. We seem to play a simpler game and 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.”
The Kings (11-3-3, 25 points) sit third in the Pacific Division, but second by point percentage (.735).
