Hiller's wrong call at the wrong time was only one factor in Kings' Game 3 loss
Kings coach Jim Hiller's ill-advised challenge of an Edmonton goal backfired and changed the course of the game. They can't let it change the course of their series against Edmonton.
Go ahead, Kings fans.
Put into words the fear you felt Friday night in the deepest recesses of your heart of hearts.
Was coach Jim Hiller’s failed challenge of a goal by Edmonton forward Evander Kane in the third period Friday—and the automatic delay of game penalty that led to Evan Bouchard’s game-winner for the Oilers 10 seconds later—another series-swaying, history-changing Marty McSorley moment?
My apologies to everyone who just let out a primal scream. It’s probably still too soon to bring up McSorley’s name and trigger memories of the illegal stick he used in Game 2 of the 1993 Stanley Cup Final. The Kings had won the opener of their first appearance in the Final, in Montreal’s forbidding Forum, and they were leading 2-1 with 1:45 left of the second game when McSorley was caught with an illegally curved stick. Montreal tied the game on the ensuing power play, won in overtime, and rolled to a five-game series victory. Not even the joy of winning the Cup in 2012 and again in 2014 put that nightmare totally to rest for many longtime Kings fans.
Hiller’s foolish decision to challenge the play for goaltender interference at that stage Friday shouldn’t change the course of a series the Kings now lead 2-1 following the Oilers’ 7-4 victory at Rogers Place. This isn’t McSorley’s stick all over again.
There’s too much evidence to suggest these Kings are strong enough mentally, offensively, and in goal to get past this and recover and not let this shatter their focus. If they can’t regroup and prevail against a team with the undeniably weak goaltending and often woeful defense the Oilers inexplicably put out there every season, then the Kings don’t deserve to advance. Simple.
Hiller’s challenge was the wrong move at the wrong time for many reasons. It took the game out of his players’ hands, the very hands that had produced 16 goals in eight periods—including a staggering seven power-play goals in 12 advantages. There were worse fates than carrying on with a 4-4 game and not giving the Oilers a power play. And the Kings had already shown resilience on Friday: they erased the Oilers’ early 2-0 lead to surge ahead 3-2, and bounced back again nine seconds after Edmonton had pulled even at 3-3, taking a 4-3 lead on a nifty one-handed goal by Thousand Oaks native Trevor Moore.
The Kings had been sitting back too much in the third period and letting Edmonton come at them—put that on Hiller, too—when Kane appeared to have kicked the puck in with a distinct kicking motion at 13:18 of the third period. A distinct kicking motion would have made the goal illegal and negated it. But at least one replay angle on local TV in Los Angeles showed that the puck had hit Kane’s stick after it had hit his skate, making it legal. Which is the ruling that came from the league’s situation room in Toronto following its routine review of every apparent goal.
Hiller took a time out and then challenged the validity of the goal on the basis of interference by Kane against Kings goaltender Darcy Kuemper, knowing full well that if his challenge was overruled, the Kings would be assessed a delay of game penalty immediately go on the penalty kill. And the Oilers had already converted a power-play advantage in the first period, their first man-advantage goal of the series.
“Well, we got a good look at it. Took plenty of time. And we felt it was goalie interference, so we challenged it,” Hiller told reporters in Edmonton. “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose on those and tonight we lost and cost us big-time. No other way around it.”
It was the turning point of the game. Bouchard scored at 13:28 and the Oilers scored twice into an empty net to give themselves a chance to tie the series in Game 4, on Sunday in Edmonton.
Hiller chose not to play it safe, though the time, place, and occasion called for avoiding that kind of risk.
“We take a time out. We understand the situation. We don’t want to give them a power play but clearly we felt that, we felt that, that challenge was in our favor. The league disagreed,” Hiller said. “You move on, and the next step would have been for us to kill a penalty and that didn’t happen either. It’s a tough stretch for us, there’s no question. That’s hockey. That’s playoff hockey, especially.”
Hiller made a few other debatable decisions on Friday, among them dressing defenseman Jordan Spence but playing Spence only two minutes and 55 seconds. Spence played three shifts in the first period, one in the second, and none in the third. In a fast-paced, emotional game why overwork Drew Doughty (27:54, -3 defensively) past the point of his optimal effectiveness, unless the Kings’ supposed depth on defense really isn’t all that trustworthy and extensive?
“We always make decisions on ice time based on how we think we’re going to win that evening’s game,” Hiller said when asked why he had played Spence so sparingly. “So if that was the case, then we felt there was guys in front of him that needed to play more. It’s just really simple.”
Forwards Trevor Lewis (3:01), Jeff Malott (4:39) and Sami Helenius (2:31) also saw little action on Friday, but Hiller has done that with the fourth line before during a season in which they tied franchise records for wins (48) and points (105). They’re not the reason the Kings lost. Or the reason the Kings can and should still win this series.
The reasons are these:
The Oilers still have dubious goaltending. Calvin Pickard started on Friday in place of Stuart Skinner, who had compiled a goals-against average of 6.11 and save percentage of .810 as the starter in Games 1 and 2 but didn’t finish Game 2. Pickard stopped 25 of 29 shots on Friday but he faced only nine shots in the third period because the Kings became too passive, a fault that Doughty acknowledged.
“It’s kind of human nature, you’re going to sit back a little more than you probably should. They brought it to us,” he said.
Another reason to believe the Kings can win: Their power play, so feeble until they acquired Andrei Kuzmenko just before the trade deadline, is blazing along at a 58.3% success rate, leading all playoff teams. And Adrian Kempe picked up a goal and an assist on Friday to take the lead among all playoff scorers with nine points and share the goalscoring lead with four. Kempe has scored a goal in all three playoff games so far.
Hiller and players said the usual things about learning from their mistakes and moving on, and it’s true that they don’t have any time to brood—which is a good thing. Doughty said his team’s faith wasn’t shaken by Friday’s loss.
“We can play from behind, we can play with the lead. We’re a good hockey team,” he said of their ability to rebound after the Oilers had opened the scoring Friday for the first time in the series. “We’ve done it all season and we believe we can get it done in the playoffs as well. Unfortunately, we didn’t tonight. We’ll look at some of the things we did in the third that were probably not right but we’ll also look at a lot of the good things we did and why we had the lead going into the third.”
Most of the current Kings hadn’t yet been born when McSorley’s crooked stick became an indelible chapter of the team’s history. It might never be forgotten, but this group has a chance to push that infamous event back into the darker regions of bad memories and create their own happier story. It’s up to them now to prove they’re capable of it.
I was screaming at the TV the whole latter part of the third period -- get the puck OUT! What I really meant was, stop playing defense and start being aggressive the way you have the whole game. Much of the third period was spent in Edmonton's end. That strategy was a major error by Hiller -- all of the post-game analysts said as much. My fear is the momentum has swung.
The worst part for me was in the post game presser when Hiller said (paraphrasing) it was an emotional game and then called the reporter asking the question emotional, too. To assume the position of the empirical expert at that time was ludicrous, especially when his decision defied any logic.
He's trying to climb Mount Everest without oxygen, hauling a piano with no sherpas. He's running three lines, double shifting Byfield and Danault while doing so.
He's playing Doughty like a kid eating too much sugar.
He's confessing his mistrust in key players by benching them, as if it weren't he that was supposed to have gotten them ready to contribute all season. Low ice time is one thing; 3 minutes total is an insult. It contradicts his stated "reasoning" given for the 11/7 which is he wants to keep guys warm despite special teams when he favors the 1st unit to almost exclusive use.
He's dressing 12/6 but playing 9/5. He's ceding a fatigue advantage that the Oilers give him. Instead of pounding McDavid and Draisaitl during their usual 21-plus minutes, he's icing Kopitar for 22 plus. Games previous one could point to 5 minutes on the Power Play to inflate the top 6 ice times, but not this game. Does he not understand that humans get tired, that Kopi is 37, that Byfield is only 22?
It's not a new idea to "play the top guys more" and other coaches have iced a 4th line with limited minutes, but keeping 22% of your lineup in purgatory is no way to get to heaven.
Hiller is short-sighted as he himself states. He abandons anything about tomorrow in wild pursuit of today.
Consider the circumstances of the challenge call; he is late-game, having over-used his top players, having blown a lead and needing to regroup, having a series lead and not wanting to lose series momentum, having seen his guys answer an earlier tying goal 9 seconds later to get the lead back, and then he decides to challenge on something so "iffy" that he needed to burn his time out just to look at it long enough to try to find something.
If they had just accepted the goal, and lost the game later, I could live with it. But to give them back the fatigue advantage, to ignore Turcotte and then sit Lewis, to burn guys out early and often in games and in the series, and then to inject himself into the outcome like the mad tinkerer I've called him in the past... these are unacceptable. These are unforced errors based on illogic. He just couldn't let it be, he had to "try something."
I had the same thoughts as you did, immediately, and so did the reporters and even the clown show broadcast crew of Liam, Ace etc. "Inexplicable", "...can't wrap my head around it", "...and he burned his time out, too, what a blunder".
McSorely's stick, a potential series changer, taking the game out of the competent hands of a hot team of players, forcing himself into the game... it was a fumb duck move and always will be.