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Kings goalie coach: Quick’s been victim of ‘a lot of unfortunate bounces’

JonathanQuickGoalGetty

Jonathan Quick won the Conn Smythe Trophy in 2012 and was the main reason Los Angeles advanced to the Western Conference Final last year, but he hasn’t enjoyed nearly as smooth of a playoff run this time around.

He hasn’t been bad -- the Kings wouldn’t have made it this far if he had been -- but he has been inconsistent. He wasn’t terribly effective against Chicago in particular, and now has a 2.86 GAA and .906 save percentage in the playoff as a result.

Still, Kings goaltending coach Bill Ranford argued that Quick’s statistics are misleading.

“I think it’s just been a lot of unfortunate bounces,” Ranford said, per LA Kings Insider.

Ranford conceded that they weren’t getting big saves out of Quick in the opening two games of Los Angeles’ first round series against the San Jose Sharks, but he feels Quick rebounded in Game 3 and hasn’t looked back.

“You look at the last playoff run last year, and even the year we won it, there were some real bad goals that he gave up,” Ranford said. “He hasn’t really given up any bad goals, and that’s been huge.

“But there’s just been more this year around, and especially in the Chicago series, you had two of the best goalies in the world, and the number of goals that were scored in that series, it was crazy. You look at the bounces that happened, it was just two very resilient teams that weren’t willing to give up.”

The Kings will be going up against a top-tier goaltender in the New York Rangers’ Henrik Lundqvist. He’s the best goalie they’ve faced thus far and he’s having a far better playoff run than Quick.

The Kings goaltender is capable of playing at the same level of him, but if he doesn’t then the Kings will have a tough time overcoming that deficiency.

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