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Posted at 2:15 PM EST.

10:05 PM EST. Regulation only. The Kings return home from a three-game in four night’s road trip that started last Friday at Chicago followed by a game Saturday in Nashville and ending Monday in St. Louis. Realistically, the soonest the Kings could have returned home was 2:00 AM or thereabouts on Tuesday morning local time. The Avs are rested and played in California already on Sunday against Anaheim.

What we have here now is an old and slow team that will be playing its fourth game in six days and figures to be fatigued against a younger and faster team that loves coming to the rink. L.A. had some moderate success on said road trip but that’s not a case of them playing well as much as it is about the Kings opposition playing awful (see St. Louis) or the Kings getting really lucky. The Blues Mike Yeo was fired after losing to the Kings and both Chicago and Nashville badly outplayed the Kings. If you lose to the Kings, you should be fired. Los Angeles hired an idiot coach, which is bound to start backfiring any time now. Willie Desjardins benched Ilya Kovalchuk last game. Ilya played two shifts in the third period Monday with the Kings clinging to a 1-0 lead. Assistant coach Marco Sturm is running the defense and the power play, and one of the twists has Nate Thompson on the second power-play unit. It’s his first extended look there in a career spent on the opposite side as a penalty killer. Thompson has 1 goal and zero assists in 20 games while Kovalchuk is perhaps the team’s biggest offensive threat but Thompson is getting PP time while Ilya is getting bench time. Everything is backwards with this organization right now and we can’t imagine for a second that any of this is sitting well with the players, other than Nate Thompson. In a difficult scheduling spot and being the absolute weakest team in the NHL, Colorado might be the bargain of the day.

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