Game Preview – Kings vs Winnipeg Jets, 15 years later

I tried to find a picture from the Winnipeg Jets the last time the Kings played them on 4-12-1996. But this was all I could find and not a King in sight! The Jets won that night 5-3 and closed out their last regular season home game as the next season they would become the Phoenix Coyotes.

Since the teams are the same as the Thrashers with Bogosian and big Byfuglian, I found a good one with Doughty. You can just replace the uniforms with the new Jets one.

The Kings and Jets have almost the same numbers with the Kings at 18-14-5 and the Jets at 17-14-5. The Kings played last night beating Chicago and Quickie earned his 5th shut-out to lead all the NHL goalies in SO this season. They will have a lot of confidence going against the Jets tonight after beating the Hawks who are 1st in the league. Winnipeg has a stat that bugs me though, they have won all of their games when a team comes into their arena on a back-to-back. Considering this is a back-to-back for the Kings tonight, I’m hoping the confidence will beat out the Jet’s stupid stat.

A few notes:

The Jets power play is averaging 17.8% while the Kings defense kills off 87.8% of their penalties.

Byfuglien is day to day with his knee injury but will probably be out tonight.

Gagne is still out on IR with no return in sight

This will be the only time we meet this season

Chances are that Bernier will start tonight, but I’ll leave the lineup the same as last night since we don’t know for sure.

Kings Line Up:

# 15 Richardson – # 11 Kopitar – # 23 Brown

# 48 Loktionov – # 10 Richards – # 22 Lewis

#25 Penner– #28 Stoll – # 14 Williams

# 13 Clifford – # 24 Fraser – # 19 Westgarth

# 8 Doughty – # 7 Scuderi

# 26 voynov –# 33 Mitchell

# 22 Greene – # 3 Johnson

# 32 Quick

# 45 Bernier

Winnipeg Jets

#9 Evander Kane – #8 Alexander Burmistrov – #26 Blake Wheeler

#16 Andrew Ladd – #80 Nik Antropov – #13 Kyle Wellwood

#15 Tanner Glass – #19 Jim Slater – #20 Antti Miettinen

#22 Chris Thorburn – #14 Tim Stapleton – #17 Eric Fehr

#39 Tobias Enstrom – #4 Zach Bogosian

#5 Mark Stuart – #6 Ron Hainsey

#29 Johnny Oduya – #36 Mark Flood

#31 Ondrej Pavelec

#50 Chris Mason

Go! Kings! Go!