For the most part, the Kings offense looks fine. They will hardly win games with their offense, but they’re tough to play against. If their power play can climb out of the depths of the league basement, they can be a respectable group.
What they lack is an elite offensive scorer, but when you can run Anze Kopitar, Quinton Byfield and Philipp Danault down the middle, you’re still in really good shape. Perhaps no team in the league has a better 1-2-3 setup than the Kings, and it should matter very little who centers their fourth line.
From a fantasy point of view, the Kings don’t offer anyone particularly exciting, but it does provide managers with a predictable group with a pretty high floor. In the middle rounds, I’d say few picks are safer than Kopitar, Byfield, Adrian Kempe and Kevin Fiala, if you can afford to suffer through his slow starts.
Byfield, in particular, looks poised to take the next step. He averaged over 18 minutes per game last season and scored at least 20 goals and 50 points for the second consecutive season. The Kings brought Byfield along as a winger because they weren’t quite sure what to make of such raw talent, but it’s clear that Byfield’s destined to become a center, and this may be the season when he overtakes Kopitar as their top center. Byfield has the highest ceiling in both real life and in fantasy value on the Kings’ roster.
The Kings have some quality wingers, and Kempe is particularly valuable in banger leagues for his hits and shot volume. Last season, only two other players managed to register at least 30 goals, 200 shots and 100 hits: Filip Forsberg and Alex Ovechkin. (Seth Jarvis was seven hits shy). That’s a really exclusive group.
The Kings also have a pair of talented but really flawed wingers in Fiala and Andrei Kuzmenko. Fiala is a notoriously slow starter and it’s gotten to the point where you can’t even buy low on him anymore in December because every manager’s trying to buy low on him in December. The secret’s out and the only viable solution is to draft Fiala knowing you might have to ignore him on your bench for the first two months.
Kuzmenko is a crafty player who gets benched a lot because he can’t play defense, but otherwise can be a solid power play contributor; the drawback is the Kings’ power play isn’t particularly good unless they use a five-forward unit, and it’s debatable if they’ll use that for an entire season. There’s a part of me that likes Kuzmenko as a sleeper pick because he meshed so well on the top line – the AK3 line, as I like to call it given their near-instant chemistry. It’s possible Kuzmenko produces something closer to his 74-point season with the Canucks than the 20 points he scored in 44 games for the Flames and Flyers.
The Kings offer a smattering of useful banger league players in Alex Laferriere, Warren Foegele and Trevor Moore, all of whom can score 40 points and provide some decent peripherals. As I noted previously, the offensive ceiling isn’t high on this team unless Byfield has a point-per-game breakout season, but the floor is high. THN Yearbook & Fantasy Guide projects four Kings to score at least 60 points and five more to score at least 40 points, but none more than Kempe’s 74.
On defense, we won’t go too deep into how the Kings swapped a really good second pair in Vladislav Gavrikov and Jordan Spence for Brian Dumoulin and Cody Ceci for the exact same price, but the general gist is that the Kings will be hard-pressed to replicate their 48-win season if their defense falters. Stingy 5-on-5 play was their calling card last season and their only reliable pair is now Mikey Anderson and Drew Doughty.
The player to watch for in fantasy, however, is Brandt Clarke. He’s projected to be the Kings’ top producer on their blueline, per THN Yearbook & Fantasy Guide. This may be the first time since 2010-11 when Doughty didn’t lead Kings defenseman in scoring (min. 50 GP).
But if the Kings run a five-forward PP unit, where will Clarke get his points? I don’t think the Kings will run a five-forward PP all season – NHL coaches are still too conservative to do that – but Clarke will also have to prove that he’s the better option than Doughty, their PP QB for well over a decade. The biggest fear for fantasy mangers who bet big on Clarke is minimal power play time and the Kings insisting on playing Dumoulin-Ceci more than they should because coaches feel like they can be trusted more due to their experience despite their general ineffectiveness.
Lastly, Darcy Kuemper might have a really hard time replicating his Vezina-worthy season. It’s not like this was a fluke; he finished fifth in Vezina voting in 2018-19 and backstopped the Avs to the Cup in 2022, but his good seasons tend to come rather infrequently. It’s worth noting that Kuemper’s quality starts percentage (.680) is unsustainably high and he’s rarely had big workloads in consecutive seasons. When he started 50 games for the second consecutive season for the first time in his career (2022-23 with the Caps, the season after he won the Cup), his numbers plummeted, though some of that can be attributed to a mediocre Caps team.
If the Kings defense, which allowed the second-fewest high-danger shot attempts at 5-on-5 last season, takes a step back, Kuemper’s job is going to be more challenging. I think the Kings are expecting this, which is why I think they upgraded their backup position with Anton Forsberg, who should have plenty of streaming value.
Prediction:
Byfield overtakes Kopitar to be the Kings’ top center by the end of the season and shares the scoring lead with Kempe, though neither manage to score more than a point per game. The Kings offense, which was anemic at times last season, becomes the least of their worries because their defense starts to get caved in on a regular basis. Clarke goes through his ups and downs, and it becomes clear that he’ll need a few more seasons to really realize his potential, forcing the Kings to rely heavily on Doughty again. Kuemper’s stats suffer a little bit but not enough to be particularly alarming as the Kings make the playoffs only to exit in the first round for the fifth straight season.
All stats courtesy of naturalstattrick.com, moneypuck.com, hockeyviz.com, allthreezones.com, hockey-reference.com, eliteprospects.com unless otherwise noted.