Murray: both goalies will play

Jason LaBarbera beat Edmonton on Wednesday and Erik Ersberg beat Chicago on Saturday. Tomorrow night against Toronto, the Kings will go back to LaBarbera, who has a 2.87 goals-against average and a .890 save percentage this season, compared to Ersberg’s 2.29 and .900. After practice today, I asked Terry Murray how he planned to handle the goaltending situation in the near future…

MURRAY: “We’ll play LaBarbera tomorrow. We’ve got four games in six days. We’ve said this all along, that it’s important to have two goalies who are capable of playing and do keep playing. I really like Barbs’ game when he played in Edmonton. He had a big win for us there and it was important to bounce back and do the right stuff as a team and get the win on the road under our belt. He’s ready to play and he’s hungry and he wants to get back in there, so he will get the game tomorrow. I know Toronto has some very big forwards who go to the net real hard, and Barbs is a big man who can match up to that battle that’s going to be there in front of the net.”

To follow up, I asked Murray if, in general, he felt comfortable rotating goalies, or whether he would prefer to pick one goalie and stick with him…

MURRAY: “If I had a number one guy that could play 82 games, I would do that. But you take a look around, and there’s only three or four of those guys in the league. In our situation, I’m going to keep going with two goaltenders. I have confidence in both guys. I think after 20 games now, the first 10 belonging to Barbs and the next 10 basically belonging to Ersberg, I got a feel and read as to what their games are about. That was important for me to be able to see that, and to get to know who they are. From here on out, I can’t make a statement today as to how I’m going to deal with it, but I know that this week, with four (games) in six days, both goalies are going to play.”

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