On the precipice of a winless road trip, the Kings limped into Raleigh for Saturday’s finale of a five-game trek, in which they’ll be opposed by the Carolina Hurricanes.
For the ‘Canes, the big story remained their recent acquisition of a copious scorer, former Colorado winger Mikko Rantanen, who’s accumulated more points than all but three other players over the past five seasons. He has a goal, an assist and 13 shots on net in three games since the swap (2-0-1). Carolina boasts the East’s second-best points percentage and a fierce 20-5-1 record at the Lenovo Center, tying the Winnipeg Jets for the most home wins in the NHL.
For the Kings, there is only the complete and utter absence of offense, as they close in on the longest scoreless streak in the NHL this season. They’ve gone 162:55 without a goal, and even that last marker was an own goal by their opponent. Per Kings broadcaster Nick Nickson, they are in a position to surpass the Seattle Kraken’s season-long goalless drought in the first period at Carolina.
Could the Kings –– they’ve languished offensively over the past 14 months and particularly so in light of back-to-back games with no goals, just four scores in their past four outings and a stretch with 11 of 12 contests in which they squeezed out two or fewer goals –– also be looking at a trade?
Coach Jim Hiller and captain Anže Kopitar eschewed the notion of needing outside help to right the ship and fortify an offense that’s ranked 28th of 32 teams (and could very soon fall to 29th) in goals since Nov. 1.
“I wouldn’t say the confidence is sky-high right now,” Kopitar told reporters. “But sometimes all it takes is a little bounce or a little something to spark the group. We’re still confident that it’s within this room.”
Compounding their woes, the Kings have had three goals disallowed during this journey, routine breaks that have been magnified enormously by the fact that they have “dried up,” in the words of Hiller.
Between misfortune and self-inflicted wounds, fans could be forgiven for having flashbacks to last season, when the Kings opened the year gliding gleefully before slipping into darkness in January. Hiller harkened back to that gloom when he said that the same group that had been blanked for eight consecutive periods and owned the NHL’s most feeble attack this month was once more successful, albeit with a less-than-reassuring caveat.
“This is the same group of guys who played extremely well and won a lot of games,” Hiller told reporters. “The puck was going in for them then. I don’t think it’s ever going to go in at a really high rate for us, that’s clear, but it’s going to go in more than it is.”
Yet this wasn’t quite the same group as earlier in the year, and a post from former NHL goalie and uber-connected insider Kevin Weekes suggested that recent lineup changes may have been a harbinger of a deal on the horizon.
Wednesday, Drew Doughty (broken ankle) returned and played over 23 minutes in his season debut, then dove headlong into a second game in two nights, in which Hiller admitted Doughty “didn’t have as much gas” across almost 28 minutes of ice time.
Watching both games from the pressbox was another right defenseman and former lottery pick, Brandt Clarke, and if the results from the early or even the not-so-early season have changed, his absence might have had something to do with it.
When the Kings met the Florida Panthers on Wednesday – the Panthers, like the Tampa Bay Lightning a night later, won 3-0 against the Kings – it was a rematch of Jan. 22’s clash at Crypto.com Arena.
There, Clarke “made the big play,” said Hiller, breaking down the defending champions’ structure and spoon-feeding Adrian Kempe for the game-winning one-timer. It was a rare moment of brilliant improvisation for a safety-obsessed, paint-by-numbers attack.
Yet the Kings sat Clarke in Florida under the hazy aegis of rest. They prioritized some unspecific constancy over game-breaking plays, which may offer the best explanation yet as to why scoring a goal now requires a rain dance and a sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli.
“He’s done great to get to this point,” Hiller told reporters, before steering his commentary into a puzzling direction. “He finally got to be a healthy scratch.”
What a magnificent privilege.
“But he’s played really well,” Hiller continued. “This league will wear you down as a young player, and this will give himself a reset. We’ll see where it goes from here.”
Where it went from there was holding Clarke out again a night later. Hiller offered no rationale as to why Clarke, 21, needed another evening off when it was Doughty, 35, who had returned from a nearly four-month layoff just 24 hours earlier, when his welcome-back party was foiled by a goal and two assists from his nemesis Matthew Tkachuk.
The Kings had employed the 11-7 configuration liberally, including using considerably less prominent players than either Doughty or Clarke as the seventh defenseman. In the back-to-back set, they opted to dress 12 forwards, despite having optioned center Samuel Helenius to the minors to make room for Doughty and leaving nine defenseman on their roster. Even in a six-rearguard alignment, inserting Clarke for a left shot would have balanced out the pairings.
More broadly, Clarke leads all Kings defensemen in scoring and power-play points by a sizable margin, despite his minutes dwindling and his power-play time evaporating over the past 10 weeks.
Clarke has been no stranger to disappointment at the junior and pro levels, perhaps most notably when a dominant campaign in the minors and a clear-cut impact on the parent club still relegated him to the AHL during last year’s playoffs while the Kings meandered impotently through yet another flogging by the Edmonton Oilers.
Weekes suggested Clarke may have been scratched this week because he was involved in a pending trade, and few if any other notions reasonably justify the decision.
The Fourth Period’s David Pagnotta later said he canvassed some Kings personnel and got no indication of any deal involving Clarke. Pagnotta did say the Kings were in search of a right-handed forward with scoring punch. On “32 Thoughts,” Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman noted that the scratches would invite calls from other teams and that Clarke’s play appeared “constrained” as a possible stylistic mismatch for the Kings.
Whether or not there was any fire behind the smoke, the Kings are now in a predicament because on a night where they might have dressed seven defensemen, they had to play with only five after Mikey Anderson injured his hand blocking Tampa center Anthony Cirelli’s shot in Thursday’s first period.
The Kings suddenly had preoccupations about a defense corps that was toiling behind the NHL’s iciest group of forwards, a lot that had hoped to win the franchise’s first playoff series since 2014.
They have changed their coaches, changed their defensive system, changed their personnel, changed their streaming service and changed their underwear, all with static results in this their eighth season under the stewardship of Luc Robitaille and Rob Blake.
Kings at Carolina
When: 4 p.m. PT Saturday
Where: Lenovo Center, Raleigh, NC
TV: KCAL (Ch. 9)