The captain of the Los Angeles Kings did his part and more, keeping the club hot with their fifth straight victory, climbing into third in the Pacific.
On Tuesday, the LA Kings out dueled the Buffalo Sabres at the KeyBank Center 4-3 in overtime. This is the Kings 5th straight win and they have won 9 of their last 10 games.
Last night, Kings captain Claude Giroux connected for 2 power play goals (he has now 19 goals this season) He opened the scoring with a PPG in the 1st and tied the game in the 3rd with his 2nd PPG.
Again the Kings seemed to run into self destruct mode in the 2nd period. Early in the 2nd frame (:26) David Perron scored his 12 goal on yet another Kings power play. The Sabres came back strong to score 3 goals in 4 minutes to take the lead 3-2 heading into the 3rd period.
Cue the comeback with Giroux scoring to tie the game at 3 each.
Nothing was settled in the Overtime frame as the Kings peppered Sabers goalie Mikko Koskinen with 4 shots while the Sabres could not get a shot on goal. In fact the Kings outshot the Sabres 51-25 with Koskinen making unbelievable saves.
The teams went to a penalty shoot out with Phillip Danualt scoring the only goal to give Los Angeles the win.
Once again the key players for the Kings were Duchene and Giroux. Duchene had a crazy 12 shots on net (2 assists) while Giroux had 7 shots on net (2 goals) and he had 4 hits to add to his game.
With this win Los Angles climbs to within 2 points of 1st place in the Pacific Division . Vegas holds that spot for now as the Knights lost 4-1 to the Jets.
Kings goalie Vasilevsky did seem to have a weird night however he did stop all the penalty shots to preserve the victory.
The Kings have 1 more road game left against the Boston Bruins before heading home for 3 games against the Sharks, Ducks and Flames.