The Kings carry five straight wins and the NHL’s sixth-best points percentage into their seven-game road trip, set to begin Tuesday on Long Island against the New York Islanders.
This will be their second journey of seven games, and it will conclude well before the season’s halfway mark.
Only five other clubs had even one seven-game swing on their schedule and none had two seven-gamers. There’s only one longer trip than this one and the season-opening tour of seven matches for the Kings, the Ottawa Senators’ grueling nine-game voyage that will feature three back-to-back sets (stick tap to Daily Faceoff for its primer on the 2024-25 NHL schedule).
While the Kings traversed time zones across nearly three weeks of the preseason and regular season, this time they’ll spend at least six days in one city while facing the three New York Metro Area teams and be in the Eastern time zone for six of seven games (they’ll only dip into the Central when they visit Nashville).
“The first one was like 18 or 19 days, this one’s only 15, so we do get a little bit of respite that way. They’re tough trips. It takes us right to Christmas, as we know,” Coach Jim Hiller said. “But, I’ll tell you what, after the homestand, it makes it easier to get on the plane and be refreshed. The guys are feeling good.”
The homestand to which he referred saw the Kings go 3-0-0, including quality wins over the Dallas Stars and Minnesota Wild. They had also won a quasi home game, a gritty effort in Anaheim against the Ducks, and outright worked the Winnipeg Jets at home in the game prior. Only the Stars’ 11-2-0 mark at home was superior to the Kings’ 10-2-1 record at Crypto.Com Arena. They’ve been a .500 team on the road, however (6-6-2).
Last season, they started the season with an NHL record number of consecutive away wins but finished the year a pedestrian 7-9-0 on the road after Hiller was promoted. Simultaneously, they went from a meandering 8-9-6 record at home to winning 14 of 18 games at home under Hiller in 2023-24, a trend that has carried over from campaign to campaign.
“We have a style of play at home that we need, now, to bring onto the road,” Hiller said. “I can remember talking last year about bringing our style of the play on the road to home. We did a pretty good job of that last year, now we’ve got to get out there and bring this game on the road.”
Hiller said he hoped his club would emerge “tighter,” “stronger” and “feeling better,” but showed reverence for the road and its challenges. One such challenge will be managing the workload of the Kings’ goalies, with Darcy Kuemper excelling in his first game back from his second lower-body injury of the young season and David Rittich having been much more than adequate in his stead. Rittich won five of his seven starts while Kuemper was out, allowing two goals or fewer in six of those appearances.
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“I think Darcy’s ready to go, clearly, he showed that (against Minnesota). I don’t know what it’ll look like, but what we do know is that they’re both in a good place,” Hiller said.
As for the Isles, they’ve failed to gain momentum all season, though that’s been true of other clubs in a Metropolitan Division where five teams are separated by two points.
They’ve been plagued by vastly substandard special-teams play. Their power play has been utterly feckless, ranking 31st of 32 teams, and their penalty kill has been even worse, placing dead last in the league. Captain Anders Lee leads them in goals (12) and points (23).