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“It’s a pretty simple write-up on this one,” said Kings coach Jim Hiller following his team’s Game 5 loss in Edmonton on Wednesday.
Not exactly, coach.
Nothing — nothing! — is simple for the Kings right now.
There are questions abound; and there will be answers in the days ahead.
For now, it’s about letting the dust settle and gathering thoughts, moving from an emotional state to an objective mindset and determining where the organization goes from here.
However, in the immediate aftermath of another first-round exit at the hands of the Oilers, here is what Hiller shared during his postgame press conference:
Hiller on if he has any thoughts on the calls against Englund in Game 4 and then Dubois in Game 5
No, no comment from me. My job is to evaluate my team. That’s what I do. Somebody else has that job, it’s not me.
On the lack of consistency and inability to show their best game throughout the course of the series
I didn’t really see it like that. I thought 5-on-5 we were pretty consistent, outside of turning the puck over a little bit in Game 3, which got us in trouble. And when you evaluate the series, it was our inability to score on the power play and their ability to score on the power play. For me, I’ve only been here for two years. When I look back and think about last year’s series, our power play performed very well. That was a difference. If we would have performed well, we’d still be playing.
On Doughty saying he believed the team didn’t have enough guys going every night throughout the series and that they needed more contributions from more players
I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know if I agree with 100%. We’ll get a chance to debrief and go through the series and evaluate players and stuff like that. In the meantime, I thought the guys did what they could do, definitely at 5-on-5. Like I said, it’s a good hockey team. So to play them the way we did 5-on-5, we have to be doing something right. It just comes down to special teams. It’s a pretty simple write-up on this one. I think we saw one team execute, one team did not. Special teams.
On if he’d like to stay on as the head coach in Los Angeles
Well, that goes without saying. It’s a great group of players with a lot of character. They made it easy for me, in what was maybe difficult circumstances for them — because of the way we had performed for about six weeks [prior to the coaching change in February]. So, I owe a lot to them. They got themselves back together, had a good break and got playing again. They’re good players, really good guys, and really good people. So, I enjoyed it.
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