LOS ANGELES — Dustin Brown scored a shorthanded goal and later used two head-and-shoulder fakes to beat goalie Dmitri Patzold for the lone shootout goal, helping the Los Angeles Kings squeak past the San Jose Sharks, 6-5 in front of a pre-season crowd of 9,258 fans at Staples Center on Tuesday night.
Derek Armstrong, Brian Willsie, Kyle Calder and forward prospect Brady Murray also scored for the Kings.
Center prospect Torrey Mitchell scored two goals for the Sharks, while prospects Devon Setoguchi, Graham Mink and Douglas Murray added goals for San Jose.
Patzold went all the way in goal for the Sharks, making just 17 saves.
Blue-chip prospect Jonathan Bernier got the start for the Kings, and looked very strong in 29:48 of ice time, stopping 18 out of 20 shots.
Dan Cloutier went the rest of the way for the Kings, and showed clear improvement from his last outing at Anaheim on September 13, despite allowing three goals on 18 shots.
In fact, Cloutier is much quicker and far more agile than at any time last season, and aside from a wrap-around goal, by Mink at 4:36 of the third period, Cloutier was solid.
“Cloutier had his moments,” said Kings head coach Marc Crawford. “He made a couple of big saves. Didn’t like the wrap-around goal for sure. There are a lot of wrap-arounds now. There’s so many, it seems that’s how the game is going. There’s lot of battles behind the net. You need to make sure you’re communicating well. We’ve got to be ready for those kinds of chances.”
“That said, it’s tough to coming in the latter half of the game,” added Crawford. “You hope those guys understand that predicament that we’re in as an organization. We want to give people opportunity. Unfortunately, because we don’t have a lot of games, we can’t give them those full games. That’s what the goalies want.”
Cloutier certainly saved his best for last, however, making three good saves in the shootout, with the last one arguably falling into the spectacular category as he dove to his left to make a glove save.
“In the shootout, he made a great save to win the game for us,” said Crawford.
“I actually bit a little bit too much on his move but that’s just one of those things that you don’t give up and you try to throw any part of your body there,” said Cloutier. “He happened to throw it in my glove, which was nice.”
For Cloutier, it is not about wins and losses at the moment. For now, he is concentrating on getting his game back to where it was after hardly playing at all over the past few years due to serious knee and hip injuries.
To read the full story, click on: Brown, Cloutier Lead Kings Past Sharks
All stories and audio content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. You may copy, distribute and/or transmit any story or audio content published on this site under the terms of this license, but only if proper attribution is indicated. The full name of the author and a link back to the original story on this site are required.
