02-05-2025
Playoff Futility No Stranger for the Los Angeles Kings
With the regularity of Lucy offering to tee-up a Charlie Brown field goal attempt, the LA Kings are once again flat on their backs, looking skyward, forced to contemplate how it all went wrong. Again.
Followers and fans of the franchise, however, are all well too versed in the shared experience of an ignominious playoff exit. Much like high pollen counts bring hay fever every spring, April and May bring defeat to the Los Angeles Kings. In fact, since their inception in 1967-68, the Kings have played in 53 playoff series, winning just 21 of them. This represents a franchise all-time playoff winning percentage of .396. If that were a regular season win percentage, you would find yourself watching lottery balls bounce around, hoping that you hit a Number One Overall.
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While it will come as little solace to the legion of faithful Kings fans, it is true the modern-day Stanley Cup playoffs are as hospitable as the gladiator pits in ancient Rome. There are no easy rounds anymore and good, maybe even great teams can be ferociously dispatched over the course of a 1st Round series. Just take a look at the Colorado-Dallas series. One of those loaded stud farms is going to be golfing just a couple of days after the Kings. What have they done to anger the Hockey Gods so?
Running afoul of hockey deities, however, cannot explain away what happened to the Kings this time. This time it feels different. LA came into this series with Edmonton as the league's best team on home ice (31-6-4). The Kings tied a franchise high of 105 points in the regular season, good for sixth overall in the entire league. They had five 20+ goal scorers on the roster, including 35 tallies each from Adrian Kempe and Kevin Fiala. The Kings were armed with a Veniza Trophy finalist Darcy Kuemper between the pipes this time, who turned in the best regular season for LA goalies since the days of prime Jonathan Quick. Worse yet, the Kings actually led this series 2-0 at one point, although that seems a lifetime ago already. Even the hapless Kings had previously been 7-1 in the playoffs when leading a team 2-0.
These are just some of the reasons that this latest failure seems self-inflicted. Although the two-headed monster of McDavid and Draisaitl was a factor in defeat, one can argue that the Kings did a better job defending them than in any of the previous series. It feels like Los Angeles allowed themselves to be beaten by the likes of Connor Brown, Mattias Janmark, and Corey Perry, and that is clearly unacceptable.
In addition to the woefully misguided coach's challenge in Game 3 by Jim Hiller, you cannot talk about this series without mentioning the baffling deployment of Brandt Clarke, Jordan Spence, and Samuel Helenius. Rather than leaning on the youth and offensive upside of Clarke and Spence, the coaching staff inexplicably chose to grind Anderson, Doughty, Edmundson, and Gavrikov into dust by never taking them off the ice. What happened in Game 6 when ice time was more even distributed amongst the defense corps? Clarke and Spence both scored goals.
As for Samuel Helenius, he seemed to embody everything that LA was lacking in previous encounters with the Oilers: size, grit and the willingness to hit anybody in the opposing jersey. Despite such seemingly useful traits, Helenius also didn't see meaningful ice time until Game 6. Helenius was immediately noticeable on the ice on the forecheck and looked like a player that could have created matchup problems for Edmonton's depleted defense corps had he been given more of a chance to do so.
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All, however, cannot be placed at the feet of head coach Jim Hiller. The players on the ice have to be the difference makers and once again, they came up short. As each game in the series became more important, the Kings shrunk. Any regular season swagger they may have had, just vanished. Quite frankly, the Kings played scared, and you have to wonder if the Oilers could see and feel that too. Where was the killer instinct to finally vanquish your nemesis from the past three seasons? How do you choke away the chance to go up 3-1 in the series with 28 seconds to go in Game 4? When given the chance to retake control of the series at home in Game 5, how do you respond with one of your most lethargic efforts of the entire year? Where was the response when Gavrikov was cross-checked in the throat by the pint-sized pest known as Viktor Arvidsson in the elimination game?
These questions, as well as many others, will haunt management, players, and fans throughout the off-season. It would behoove the ownership group to seriously address these concerns because the fans in LA truly deserve so much better.
