Tensions Rising in LA as Kings’ Losing Skid Reaches Boiling Point Against Sabres
The Los Angeles Kings are in the eye of the storm, and it doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon.
Despite an impressive start to the 2023-24 season, the Kings have been spiralling out of control over the last several weeks, which has one of the NHL’s pre-season Stanley Cup favourites clinging to the first wild-card seed in the West by only a few points.
As Wednesday night’s disappointing affair versus the Buffalo Sabres proved, things will likely continue to worsen before they improve – a sentiment that saw tensions boil over inside the team’s locker room in the moments following a disastrous 5-3 defeat.
Los Angeles’ skaters jumped out to a 3-1 lead at home before allowing a deluge of unanswered goals to end the night, all of which came at five-on-five. Two of which came within three minutes of each other in the third period.
The Kings did all their damage in the opening frame, failing to crack the scoreboard over the final 40 minutes. Drew Doughty, who earned a primary assist on Adrian Kempe’s first-period marker, didn’t hold back while assessing his club’s uninspiring performance after the game.
“We’ve got guys in this room that are too worried about themselves, worried about their points,” Doughty told reporters post-game, including the LA Times’ Helene Elliott, regarding a Kings team that’s dropped 12 of its previous 14 games.
“We had a 3-1 lead tonight, and guys started thinking it was a cookie night. We stopped playing the way we know how to play, had an awful second period and aren’t much better in the third.”
Doughty refused to single out any of his teammates with his comments, but you probably don’t have to search for long to discover which skaters he was referring to.
Newly acquired Pierre-Luc Dubois – who put the Kings ahead 3-1 at the end of the first – has just 10 goals and 20 points in 45 games following a trade that sent a package of Gabriel Vilardi, Alex Iafallo, Rasmus Kupari and a 2024 second-round pick to the Winnipeg Jets.
“It’s about the team, not about yourself,” Doughty continued. “Guys on this team, we need to realize that.”
Dubois isn’t the only Kings forward underperforming, as Kevin Fiala has committed 33 giveaways across 45 contests – four less than he had in 69 games last season – while sitting on 11 goals after notching 23 in 2022-23, tied for the second-most of his career.
Once a staple of their recipe for success, the club’s goaltending situation has unravelled recently, with starter Cam Talbot allowing five goals in three straight games. But he hasn’t received much support from his teammates, exceeding 35 shots on net in two of his last four starts.
That’s left the 36-year-old netminder – who posted a remarkable 2.02 GAA and .926 SV% with a pair of shutouts over his first 20 starts – without a win since December 23rd.
It also hasn’t helped that the Kings have been without forward Viktor Arvidsson all season after he underwent back surgery last fall, subtracting a top-six winger from their lineup who recorded 26 goals and 59 points across 77 games a season ago.
“What I see is we’re not playing as a team right now. Worry about scoring goals too much and not buying into the stuff that made us successful the first 30, 35 games of the year, and it’s frustrating,” captain Anze Kopitar said of his club’s recent play. “We’re going to have to correct it, and we’re going to have to correct it in a hurry.”
For a team that entered this season with championship aspirations, they certainly don’t resemble a franchise motivated to win a playoff round for the first time since capturing the 2014 Stanley Cup.
“We’re maybe not playing our best, but the stupidity that went into that loss is beyond explainable,” head coach Todd McLellan said. “I could come up here and tell you, ‘Hey in the past we’ve been close, maybe we didn’t get some luck around the net,’ but I haven’t, until now, been able to come in and say, ‘Boy, we played really dumb.’ And that’s what we did.”
McLellan is starting to feel the heat of this losing skid as well. As the losses continue piling up, it’s worth wondering if management would consider a mid-season coaching change.
Kings GM Rob Blake seems determined to stay the course, as TSN’s Darren Dreger reports, believing in the team’s ability to bend but not break. As bleak as things are, the post-season remains a likely destination, given MoneyPuck’s model has their odds at 87.4%.
But with a three-game road trip beginning Friday in Colorado, McLellan’s job is far from safe as Los Angeles heads toward the All-Star break.
“If I was sitting in your seat and you were standing up here I would ask you about it,” he said. “I’m responsible for this. And when you look at the team that played the first 25, 30 games, it doesn’t look like the team that’s playing right now and I’m responsible for it.”
After facing the 31-14-3 Avalanche, who’ve won seven of their previous 10, the Kings will head further East to take on the St. Louis Blues and Nashville Predators – two clubs positioned directly behind them in the wild-card race – before closing out the unofficial first half.
While the front office continues to exercise patience, they may not have any choice but to make a change behind the bench if McLellan’s squad doesn’t respond during this critical stretch.
-Thomas Hall
Twitter: @Hall_Thomas_
Photo: Jenn G. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.