Kings Locker Room: Doughty on Copley’s Almost Fight & Kempe on Success Against the Ducks

The Los Angeles Kings strolled into Anaheim with a red hot offense and two straight wins under their belt. They kept the good times rolling with a 6-3 win over the Anaheim Ducks. 

The story of the night was a near goalie fight, as Pheonix Copley and John Gibson tried to square off at center ice. The fight didn't happen, but Copley was ejected for throwing punches with his glove on. 

Copley was sucker punched by Ducks forward Frank Vatrano leading to the festivities and Drew Doughty touched on Copley showing some fire. Adrian Kempe also addressed his recent success against the Ducks.

Hear from Doughty, Kempe, Trevor Moore and Todd McLellan postgame. 

Doughty on if he knew Copley had a fiery side:

No, honestly I had no idea. He's like a super nice, calm person. I never in a million years thought that he would do that. I haven't seen it, but I can't wait to see it. I'm glad he stood up for himself, I'm glad everyone stood up on the ice for him too. 

On the number of Kings fans at Honda Center:

Yeah, it seemed more like a home game than an away game to be honest. When we would score it seemed like more than three-quarters of the barn were standing up so, great support from our fans tonight, it felt really good.

On the power play's improvement:

Yeah, the power play's a lot better this year, we have much better plan. Obviously, we added Kevin (Fiala) who's basically a power play specialist so, yeah very happy with how the power play is performing. Really happy.

Moore on playing in a rivalry game he grew up around:

I mean it's fun, I enjoy being able to be apart of this rivalry, like you said, it's something I grew up watching. Being able to drive down the 405 and be able to play these guys, it's pretty cool. Pretty familiar drive. 

Kempe on his recent success against the Ducks:

I don't know if it's anything particular. It's a rivalry, obviously you're pumped up for the game. It doesn't matter where the teams are in the standings and stuff like that. They're always tight games and it was tight tonight, a little tighter than we wanted to, I just try to go out there and do the same things every night. Just works against Anaheim I guess.

McLellan on what he liked about the game:

I thought it was a tough game to play, tough game to win. Competitive, we had to be patient, penalties, special teams situation. Losing a starting goaltender, a lot of variables went into the night. But I was happy with the special teams and obviously finding a way to close out the night was important for us.

Balancing the team wanting to stand up for Copley and keeping their composure:

At this time of the year, the win is the important thing. We want to take care of teammates, I'm sure the Ducks team wants to do that as well. But it's about winning right now and I thought we controlled our emotions fairly well in that situation. We had an opportunity to regroup, it gave Quickie (Jonathan Quick) a chance to get his head ready for the third period. And then the penalty kill did a pretty good job, I know we got scored on once but they did a real good job in that situation. 

On Friday's lineup being the teams "ideal" lineup:

Yeah, it is. If we could get Grunny (Carl Grundstrom) healthy, then we have tough decisions to make night after night. It's almost unfair because we have guys: Lemieux, Grundstrom, Jaret Anderson-Dolan that all didn't play tonight and they are quality players that worked really hard and deserved to be in there. So we've got tough decisions, three coming off injuries soon to be four with Grunny. We've got to get them all up and running and we need to take that into consideration as well when we make these nightly decisions.