Frozen Royalty: Terry Murray Reflects On 2009-10 Season

Gann Matsuda had a lengthy interview with Terry Murray last week in preparation for the start of training camp. Here’s part one talking about his reflections on last season. Check it out!

EL SEGUNDO, CA — With his team’s 2010 training camp coming up in less than two weeks, Los Angeles Kings head coach Terry Murray has returned to Southern California to prepare, knowing that his team must improve upon what they accomplished last year.

That said, the Kings’ 2009-10 season was one where the team took a big step forward.

“[Our team showed] good improvement, improvement that, I think, all of us were looking forward to as we started last year,” said Murray. “We had a start that was very important. It was a good start, the team played well. We were looking at the [line of Anze Kopitar, Ryan Smyth and Justin Williams] as, probably, the best line in hockey at the start of the year, the first twenty games. They really gave us the energy and the momentum that we hoped would come out of the previous season.”

“I felt, over the course of the year, the players did a great job in maintaining the focus and the momentum that was built,” added Murray. “There were very few stretches where we took any kind of a big step backwards for an extended period of time, and we were able to live up to our own expectations as we got to the [midpoint] of the year.”

The hot start and continued success through the first few months of the season not only made those expectations attainable, but they also added to them—the Kings not only had to make the playoffs, but they could not be satisfied with that. Indeed, they now had to put in a respectable showing and not be a first-round pushover.

“I thought our expectations got to be pretty high,” Murray noted. “Our goals got to be higher, and I was really pleased with how things unfolded as the season came to an end.”

Read the rest on Frozen Royalty.