Fresh promise and auspicious beginnings gave way to stale results from a season of tumult for the Kings, who were eliminated by the Edmonton Oilers, again, on Wednesday.
Edmonton has become more efficient in its disposal of its black-and-silver-clad warmup act, shortening the series and improving the performance of its lethal power play with each passing postseason meeting since 2022.
This Kings’ campaign was a zero-gravity roller coaster fit for a Six Flags property. Its early-season ascent saw the Kings set a record for the most consecutive road wins to start a campaign and reach the top of the NHL in both goals-for and goals-against averages, while posting the West’s top points percentage. But the middle of the season brought a freefall of epic proportions, with a stretch in which they lost 14 of 16 games leading to the dismissal of coach Todd McLellan and promotion of Jim Hiller.
Their finish, marked by twists and turns of its own but softened by one of the cushiest schedules in the NHL, squeaked them into the playoffs for a third straight first-round series with the Oilers that, again, began in Edmonton.
By that point, the Kings had turned a weakness from last season into a strength, their penalty kill, and also swapped early dominance on the road for a stronger home-ice advantage down the stretch.
They jockeyed around the top of the penalty-kill leaderboard, holding the No. 1 position for lengthy stretches and ultimately finishing second in the NHL, after last year’s PK struggled in the regular season and playoffs.
But this postseason, they performed even more poorly than last year, when they were sub-50% short-handed. Their numbers appeared to improve slightly but, factoring in a series-ending 19-second power play for Edmonton that technically counted as a Kings kill as well as two de-facto power-play goals the Oilers scored just as penalties expired, the PK performed, in effect, at a paltry 42%.
“We were first in the league for the whole season and, all of a sudden, it’s a different power play and different players – I mean, the best player in the world [Connor McDavid] – so, they find ways,” said Phillip Danault, who was tasked with matching up with McDavid for much of these three playoff series.
The Kings’ 11 away wins to start the year didn’t transfer to home ice, where they waited all the way until late February to earn their 11th win, months after they set the road record. Yet after the All-Star break and coaching change, the Kings were the league’s top team at handling hosting duties. That meant nothing in the playoffs, where they lost both games at Crypto.com Arena thanks to a feeble attack that produced one goal in 120 minutes.
In a year when Edmonton was somewhat conservative at the trade deadline and the Kings were extremely active in the offseason – they machinated fervently to land Pierre-Luc Dubois, who landed on the fourth line in a series he was supposed to swing – the gap between the two clubs grew.
So vastly did it widen that the question was posed: Can this Kings team win in the playoffs?
“We haven’t proven that yet, so, I’m not going to say no, but it’s a tough question,” defenseman Drew Doughty said. “We haven’t proved it, that’s the bottom line.”
McDavid became just the second player in NHL history to record 10 or more assists in a playoff series twice (the other was Wayne Gretzky), notching 11 this year after picking up 10 in the 2022 series against the Kings, which lasted two more games. In the second round that same year, Leon Draisaitl set the record for assists in a series with 15 against the archrival Calgary Flames. In the past three postseasons, McDavid and Draisaitl rank Nos. 1 and 2 in scoring by an enormous margin, with McDavid’s 65 points being 21 more than his next most prolific opponent, Colorado’s Mikko Rantanen. This year, Edmonton winger Zach Hyman’s seven goals have him tied for the league lead with Colorado’s Valeri Nichushkin.
Meanwhile, the Kings’ cannons fired in only one game of the series, their 5-4 victory in Game 2, with flukes and own-goals accounting for almost a third of the baker’s dozen goals that the Kings squeezed out across their ephemeral first-round effort.
While their offense was best represented by an ellipsis, their failure on the power play in particular merited an exclamation point. Where last year they offset, in part, Edmonton’s double-take-inducing percentage with their own respectable power play, this time out the Kings went 0 for 12 while their penalty kill allowed Edmonton’s man-advantage units to run roughshod over them.
“We’ve just got to play better, really. Special teams hurt us a lot this series,” captain Anže Kopitar said. “There were parts of the games where we were good, we were dictating the game, but we’ve got to do it more often.”
As much discussion as there was of the series and Wednesday’s Game 5, the Kings had been suffering long before the spring.
Their offseason saw them frantically jettison players who had put in tremendous effort to rise through the ranks of the organization in an effort to acquire Dubois in a sign-and-trade deal that allowed him to arrive with a maximum eight-year term and a hefty $68 million price tag. Sean Durzi was thrust into duty when Doughty was injured in 2022, and quickly became an asset on the playing surface and the dressing room alike, but was traded hastily for a pick used in the Dubois deal. Gabe Vilardi was a lottery selection who battled serious back problems during his development and converted from center to wing in a painstaking process that yielded encouraging results last season. Alex Iafallo had risen from undrafted free agent to first-line winger, only to be tossed into the deal with Vilardi and former first-round pick Rasmus Kupari.
Dubois was an abject disappointment, in the season and the series alike. He hit the net just once in the past three games and only four times in the series, with his lone goal being the hockey equivalent of a double-doink field goal in football. His most effortful play was a fierce check on Draisaitl in Game 5, but instead of shifting momentum for the Kings, it elicited a penalty call and, predictably, a goal for Edmonton.
During the season, Dubois had 40 points in 82 games and instead of being the mighty hunter he was portrayed to be, he mostly filled up on low-hanging fruit and empty calories, requiring both weak opposition and strong support to produce, for the most part.
Yet in the playoffs, he was hardly alone in the freezer. Only team MVP and leading point-producer Adrian Kempe contributed more than one goal among the Kings’ forwards.
A lineup that basically resigned itself to three lines and often depended on one, that of Danault, saw its top players largely recede from the fore. Viktor Arvidsson had three points but many more missed opportunities in the series, while Danault and top goal-scorer Trevor Moore combined for just two points.
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Quinton Byfield started strong with four points in three games but was decidedly less visible in the final two losses. Even Kopitar produced a superlative game in the Kings’ lone victory – he compiled three points and a plus-three rating in addition to scoring the game-winning goal – but had no points and a minus-three rating in the other four games combined.
Kopitar was not about to dissect and analyze the campaign moments after being eliminated, but he aptly summarized the fleeting hopes of a build that aligned precisely with the 36-year-old’s twilight years on the ice.
“It’s definitely not a great feeling getting the worst of it, three years in a row,” the captain said.