Los Angeles Kings Add Cup-Winning Experience With New GM Ken Holland
From foe to friend: the Los Angeles Kings have hired Ken Holland as their new general manager.
Holland spent five seasons at the helm of the Edmonton Oilers from 2019-24, as the team's president and general manager. He oversaw the construction of the roster that ended the Kings' playoff hopes in the first round in 2022, 2023 and 2024 before ceding the reins to Stan Bowman. This year, Holland served as a consultant for the NHL's hockey operations department and despite a strong regular season and securing home-ice advantage for Round 1, the Kings fell to the Oilers for a fourth-straight year.
Los Angeles hasn't won a playoff series since winning the Stanley Cup in 2014. So when the dust settled, the team and general manager Rob Blake agreed to part ways on May 6.
A Hockey Hall of Fame member and former Kings captain, Blake joined the Los Angeles management team in 2013. In 2017, he added the general manager title to his role as vice president of hockey operations.
When Holland signed on with the Oilers in 2019, it was widely assumed that his five-year contract would take him to retirement. He was 68 when the deal concluded, and had a long resume that also included 36 years in the Detroit Red Wings organization, where he won four Stanley Cups.
But perhaps the way he left the Red Wings should have been a hint that he still isn't quite ready to sit on the sidelines. When Steve Yzerman signed on as Detroit's general manager and bumped Holland up to a senior VP role in the summer of 2019, it took him just 18 days to secure the GM position in Edmonton.
By comparison, this latest hiring was leisurely. But Holland sent up a signal that he might be looking to get back into the game when he spoke to Frank Seravalli of Daily Faceoff at the NHL's board of governors' meetings in December, while working with NHL hockey operations.
'I'm not sure if I enjoy a stress-free existence,' he confessed.
The stress should be available in abundance in Los Angeles, where the Kings have a talented roster that hasn't been able to re-capture the magic of its two Cup runs in 2012 and 2014.
As the lone holdovers from those Cup years, captain Anze Kopitar remains a two-way force at age 37 and is under contract for one more year, while defenseman Drew Doughty came back strong from a pre-season ankle injury at age 35. He's signed for two more seasons.
Behind them, Phillip Danault provides reliable center depth and 22-year-old Quinton Byfield is establishing himself as a star at the position. On the wings, the Kings get scoring from Adrian Kempe, Kevin Fiala, Warren Foegele and Alex Laferriere while Mikey Anderson and Brandt Clarke lead the next wave of defensemen.
In net, Darcy Kuemper was named a Vezina trophy finalist in his first year back with Los Angeles following an off-season trade.
PuckPedia shows the team with 19 of 23 roster spots filled for the 2025-26 season, and more than $23 million in cap space. Laferriere is a restricted free agent without arbitration rights, and a handful of players are approaching unrestricted free agency: forwards Andrei Kuzmenko and Tanner Jeannot, defenseman Vladislav Gavrikov and goalie David Rittich.
In January, Scott Wheeler of The Athletic ranked the Kings' prospect pool 26th out of 32 NHL teams. Their most intriguing prospects are a pair of teenage goaltenders who are currently understudying with their national teams at the 2025 IIHF world championship: Frozen Four winner Hampton Slukynsky of Western Michigan university with Team USA and Carter George with Team Canada. At 24, Erik Portillo earned a win in his first NHL start last November. He should get the opportunity to compete for a roster spot with the big club this fall.
In hockey circles, Holland's reputation is somewhat mixed. In Detroit, he was renowned for finding value in the late rounds of the draft, most notably Pavel Datsyuk (sixth round, 171st overall, 1998), Vladimir Konstantinov (11th round, 221st overall, 1989) and Henrik Zetterberg (11th round, 220th overall, 1999). Along with guiding the Red Wings to championships in 1997 as an assistant general manager) and then in 1998, 2002 and 2008 as GM, he also oversaw the team's streak of 25 consecutive playoff appearances from 1991 to 2016. But he left the cupboards quite bare upon his departure, and the Wings have now gone nine years without any post-season action.
When Holland joined the Oilers, the team boasted two of the top talents in the league in Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, but had missed the playoffs in 12 of the previous 13 seasons. They made the playoffs in all five years under his watch and made steady progress, eventually reaching Game 7 of the 2024 Stanley Cup final before falling to the Florida Panthers.
Inevitably, there were some blunders along the way. The Oilers bought out the final three seasons of the five-year $25-million contract that Holland bequeathed on goaltender Jack Campbell in 2022. Also, his win-now focus on acquiring veterans for Edmonton's Cup push left the team tight to the salary cap and vulnerable when St. Louis Blues GM Doug Armstrong signed promising young players Philip Broberg and Dylan Holloway to dual offer sheets last August.
Holland was also believed to be in consideration for the New York Islanders' vacant GM position, after the team announced last month that Lou Lamoriello would not be back in that position.
Ken Holland will meet the media in Los Angeles for the first time on Thursday at 11:30 a.m. PT.
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