The Los Angeles Kings are a win-now team, but in the improving Pacific Division, the Kings will be challenged just to make it into the Stanley Cup playoffs, let alone win a championship. Kings GM Ken Holland is pushing all of his chips in, but will that be enough to make them a Cup-winner?
The Los Angeles Kings have been actively pushing to win a Stanley Cup for years now, but this past season, they narrowly made the playoffs before being swept by the Colorado Avalanche in the first round.
It’s now been five straight post-seasons in which Los Angeles was eliminated in the opening round, and LA has won only eight playoff games in that five-year span.
The Kings have been moving in the wrong direction, but Los Angeles GM Ken Holland has been putting together a team he can only hope wins now. But there’s no plan likely to get LA the high-end talent they need to go far in the long term. That should be rather worrisome to Kings fans.
Now, has Holland made the Kings a better team this summer?
Yes, he has.
By bringing back veteran forwards Scott Laughton and Corey Perry via free agency, as well as signing longtime Minnesota Wild winger Mats Zuccarello and former Nashville Predators center Erik Haula as free agents, Holland has delivered more experience and bottom-six forward depth to his team.
However, what Holland hasn’t addressed is arguably the most important part of his team – the Kings’ defense corps. He did sign journeyman blueliner Erik Gustafsson to a one-year, $1-million deal, but the 34-year-old Gustafsson doesn’t move the needle, and there’s a reason why the Kings are Gustafsson’s ninth NHL team. He can come in and help Los Angeles tread water if there are any injuries, but otherwise, Gustafsson is a spare part. And the rest of the Kings’ defensemen are hardly an imposing group.
In fairness, the Kings had the NHL’s seventh-best defense this past season, averaging 2.90 goals against per game. And we like their goalie tandem of Darcy Kuemper and Anton Forsberg, who are both entering the final season of their contracts and thus motivated to deliver strong results.
But after Holland’s off-season spending spree, LA now has only $1.8 million in salary cap space, leaving them with little space to address any in-season issues. From this writer’s perspective, in an improving Pacific Division, the Kings, as is, are not going to be a lock to be a playoff team next season.
Indeed, while the Kings are going to benefit from a full season of star left winger Artemi Panarin – and while they’re also going to have star winger Kevin Fiala back from a major injury last season – you have to look at the Pacific and wonder where LA fits in the 2026-27 standings.
The Anaheim Ducks are likely to be at least as good as they were last season, if not better. The same goes for the San Jose Sharks. The Edmonton Oilers and Vegas Golden Knights will almost certainly be playoff teams next year.
The only non-rebuilding Pacific team that we believe the Kings will absolutely be better than is the Seattle Kraken. But that’s damning with faint praise. The reality is that Los Angeles is living on borrowed time, and they haven’t developed enough elite talent internally. That’s why they acquired Panarin from the New York Rangers and gave him a two-year contract at $11 million per season.
The Kings do have cap flexibility down the line, as they’re projected to have approximately $78.1 million in cap space for the 2028-29 season. Though some may claim Holland has that amount of cap space open to sign a superstar like Oilers dynamo Connor McDavid or Toronto Maple Leafs icon Auston Matthews, there’s no assurance either one of those superstars will even be available at that point.
Holland has all three of his next three first-round draft picks, and he also has four second-rounders over the next three drafts. So it will be intriguing to see whether Holland trades top picks for immediate veteran help or hangs on to them and acquires more young talent for the long haul.
But as it stands, the Kings aren’t likely to challenge for a top spot in the Pacific. More likely, LA will be battling it out for a wild card berth. That means there’s a very real danger the Kings will miss the playoffs for the first time since the 2020-21 season.
The Kings aren’t going to be a bottom-dweller in the Western Conference. But as we’ve seen in the salary cap era, the difference between making and missing the playoffs could be a matter of only one or two standings points. So LA has to push hard to avoid the basement, and the best they may hope for is fourth or fifth place in the Pacific – and that may not be good enough to be a playoff team next season.
The Kings feel very much like a fringe playoff team at this point, and Holland will need to be creative to improve his group from this point on. Los Angeles won’t be projected to do much damage next season, and the Kings have to honestly assess where they are in their competitive cycle and be better at developing talent internally.
LA could use some generational talent to be part of their bedrock foundation for their new era, and Holland has to figure out ways to get his hands on Grade-A skill. Otherwise, the Kings’ mediocrity and misery will continue.
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