LOS ANGELES –– Following Tuesday’s defeat by Washington, Kings coach Jim Hiller said he had “plenty in his backpocket” when it came to forward lines and defensive pairings.
Yet after Thursday’s underwhelming loss to Chicago, whom they’ll host again Saturday, it appeared he might have been left with little but a ball of lint.
Wholesale changes were made before the game, during the match and, if recent results served as any indicator, in the coaches’ office afterward, too. The results were no different, with the Kings eking out just one goal for the seventh time this season and the fifth instance in their past nine games.
Hiller said after the loss to the Blackhawks, a 2-1 final thanks to some Herculean goaltending by Darcy Kuemper, that “we had a team of players that thought they were going to play their game, their way.”
Hiller was then asked if the overall feebleness of the Kings’ offense contributed to their undesired improvisation.
“If I had to guess, I would say yes,” said Hiller, positing some hypothetical dialogue among his players. “’Hey, let’s do it this way. I’ll just do this or maybe I’ll go over here, y’know it’d be really good if you can do something that you really can’t do, but try it anyways.”
The Kings are barely scoring five-on-five and the power play has sapped energy from their game time and time again during their acrid, 5-for-63 stretch. They have all their players available, and they’ve tried to toss together nearly every combination of ingredients at their disposal.
Within the Kings’ 18 regular skaters, there are 14 returners from last season. Among them, only Quinton Byfield, Joel Edmundson and Brandt Clarke are on a path to equal or surpass their production from 2024-25. Ten other players are on track for at least a dip, with captain Anže Kopitar (-20 points), last year’s plus-minus leader Warren Foegele (-27 points) and alternate captain Phillip Danault (-31 points) on pace for the most precipitous plummets.
Drew Doughty, who missed 52 games last year with an injury, has seen his per-game production decline from .57 to .40 points.
Last year’s major trade-deadline acquisition, Andrei Kuzmenko, had 17 points in a 14-game span last spring, but is on track for a paltry 23 points in this campaign.
Newcomers Joel Armia and Corey Perry trended toward a spike from last year, but those honeymoons might be ending. Armia has no points in his past four outings and Perry has no goals with just two assists in his last 11 appearances.
Brian Dumoulin and Cody Ceci had already scored fewer points last year than Vladislav Gavrikov and Jordan Spence, whom they replaced in a threshold sense, but were on course to drop another 25% from their own lesser totals.
In short, the Kings face issues at all three levels of the organization: management, coaching and on-ice personnel.
Their backward-hustling offseason started out with a new general manager, as veteran Ken Holland stepped in for Rob Blake after the latter declined to sign a new contract. Already having made significant alterations to a roster laden with age and trade protection as well as a major change in management, coaching could be next.
Hiller, who has expressed puzzlement at his team’s stale results and who presided over the power play when he was an assistant to his predecessor Todd McLellan, surely feels the warmth under his derriére.
ESPN’s Greg Wyshinki posted “[Peter] DeBoer to L.A. when?” after the Chicago loss and Elite Prospects’ Cam Robinson provided something of an answer Friday morning.
Robinson shared that the Kings and DeBoer have discussed a potential vacancy, though he posited that it would take a substantial offer to sway DeBoer.
DeBoer twice took teams to the Stanley Cup Final in his first season as head coach – the 2012 Devils that lost to the Kings and 2016 Sharks that beat the Kings in Round 1 before falling to Pittsburgh – and he led the Dallas Stars to the past three Western Conference finals.
Should the Kings pursue a shift to DeBoer, they could have significant competition given other underachievers around the league, most notably the Kings’ tormentors in recent years, the Edmonton Oilers.
When: 6 p.m. Saturday
Where: Crypto.com Arena
TV: FDSN West, KCAL (Ch. 9)
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Yet after Thursday’s underwhelming loss to Chicago, whom they’ll host again Saturday, it appeared he might have been left with little but a ball of lint.
Wholesale changes were made before the game, during the match and, if recent results served as any indicator, in the coaches’ office afterward, too. The results were no different, with the Kings eking out just one goal for the seventh time this season and the fifth instance in their past nine games.
Hiller said after the loss to the Blackhawks, a 2-1 final thanks to some Herculean goaltending by Darcy Kuemper, that “we had a team of players that thought they were going to play their game, their way.”
Hiller was then asked if the overall feebleness of the Kings’ offense contributed to their undesired improvisation.
“If I had to guess, I would say yes,” said Hiller, positing some hypothetical dialogue among his players. “’Hey, let’s do it this way. I’ll just do this or maybe I’ll go over here, y’know it’d be really good if you can do something that you really can’t do, but try it anyways.”
The Kings are barely scoring five-on-five and the power play has sapped energy from their game time and time again during their acrid, 5-for-63 stretch. They have all their players available, and they’ve tried to toss together nearly every combination of ingredients at their disposal.
Within the Kings’ 18 regular skaters, there are 14 returners from last season. Among them, only Quinton Byfield, Joel Edmundson and Brandt Clarke are on a path to equal or surpass their production from 2024-25. Ten other players are on track for at least a dip, with captain Anže Kopitar (-20 points), last year’s plus-minus leader Warren Foegele (-27 points) and alternate captain Phillip Danault (-31 points) on pace for the most precipitous plummets.
Drew Doughty, who missed 52 games last year with an injury, has seen his per-game production decline from .57 to .40 points.
Last year’s major trade-deadline acquisition, Andrei Kuzmenko, had 17 points in a 14-game span last spring, but is on track for a paltry 23 points in this campaign.
Newcomers Joel Armia and Corey Perry trended toward a spike from last year, but those honeymoons might be ending. Armia has no points in his past four outings and Perry has no goals with just two assists in his last 11 appearances.
Brian Dumoulin and Cody Ceci had already scored fewer points last year than Vladislav Gavrikov and Jordan Spence, whom they replaced in a threshold sense, but were on course to drop another 25% from their own lesser totals.
In short, the Kings face issues at all three levels of the organization: management, coaching and on-ice personnel.
Their backward-hustling offseason started out with a new general manager, as veteran Ken Holland stepped in for Rob Blake after the latter declined to sign a new contract. Already having made significant alterations to a roster laden with age and trade protection as well as a major change in management, coaching could be next.
Hiller, who has expressed puzzlement at his team’s stale results and who presided over the power play when he was an assistant to his predecessor Todd McLellan, surely feels the warmth under his derriére.
ESPN’s Greg Wyshinki posted “[Peter] DeBoer to L.A. when?” after the Chicago loss and Elite Prospects’ Cam Robinson provided something of an answer Friday morning.
Robinson shared that the Kings and DeBoer have discussed a potential vacancy, though he posited that it would take a substantial offer to sway DeBoer.
DeBoer twice took teams to the Stanley Cup Final in his first season as head coach – the 2012 Devils that lost to the Kings and 2016 Sharks that beat the Kings in Round 1 before falling to Pittsburgh – and he led the Dallas Stars to the past three Western Conference finals.
Should the Kings pursue a shift to DeBoer, they could have significant competition given other underachievers around the league, most notably the Kings’ tormentors in recent years, the Edmonton Oilers.
Chicago at Kings
When: 6 p.m. Saturday
Where: Crypto.com Arena
TV: FDSN West, KCAL (Ch. 9)
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