Kempe, Kings snap slide in style
EDMONTON, Canada — Adrian Kempe scored a pair of goals and the Kings snapped a two-game skid with a 5-1 win over the Edmonton Oilers on Sunday.
Rasmus Kupari, Drew Doughty and Trevor Moore also scored for the Kings, who netted three power-play goals in a span of 2:19 late in the third after Edmonton’s Connor McDavid was given a boarding major for hitting Kempe from behind.
“We just stuck to our game plan, we didn’t sit back, kept pushing forward,” Doughty said. “Our game plan is never to take a lot of high risks, just to stay calm, get pucks in and get pucks out. We didn’t want to change anything in the third, we didn’t want to sit back.”
Darnell Nurse scored the lone goal for the Oilers, who lost two straight for the first time this season. Mikko Koskinen stopped 35 shots.
“This has been coming for a while here, been coming for a while,” Oilers coach Dave Tippett said. “We’ve been masking it with some special teams stuff, but we haven’t had enough guys play well for a while. It was a 2-1 score but weren’t good enough in it, and we gave up some power-play goals at the end.”
The Oilers got off to another bad start, as the Kings scored just two minutes in when Moore made a nice touch pass to Kupari at the side of the net for an easy tap-in past Koskinen.
The Kings made it 2-0 less than two minutes into the second period, with Kempe scoring his ninth on a wrist shot that Koskinen could have saved.
Notes: The Kings were missing two players because of COVID-19 — Andreas Athanasiou and Blake Lizotte . ... Kings forward Brendan Lemieux served the third of a five-game suspension for biting Ottawa forward Brady Tkachuk.