An Identity at an Impasse

SAN DIEGO, CA – The Stanley Cup banners from 2012 and 2014 still hang in Crypto.com Arena, and, fairly, they always will. But at some point, a franchise has to reckon with whether those banners are a source of inspiration for nostalgic zoom-ins during the national anthem or a set of chains, and for the Los Angeles Kings, the answer in 2025-26 felt uncomfortably close to the latter.

One season ago, this team was 48-25-9, with 105 points, second in the Pacific, and a Simple Rating System score of +0.50, ranking them sixth in the league. The Simple Rating System measures average goal differential per game adjusted for strength of schedule, where 0.0 represents a league-average team. By that measure, the Kings last season were a legitimate contender still figuring out how to win in May. 

This past season, they finished 35-27-20, 90 points, good for fourth in the Pacific, eighth in the West, near dead last in penalty kill, and ranked 24th in that same metric at -0.32. A 15-point drop in the standings is not just a bad year; it’s a signaling one. A swing of nearly a full point in goal-differential rating, from top-ten to bottom third, is something more systemic. That is a team whose construction stopped working, and the numbers make no attempt to hide it.

Well, even with those numbers, they made the playoffs again; that’s good, right? Colorado swept them, exposing an identity and backend no longer fit in the modern NHL. The Kings stand at the exact same fork in the road they have been staring at for years, except now they have finally run out of excuses not to take it.

A Championship Built for a Different Era

To understand what is wrong with the Kings, you have to understand what was right about them. The 2012 and 2014 championship squads were built on a specific formula: elite goaltending from Jonathan Quick, deep and dominant center play anchored by Anze Kopitar, and a defensive core as physically suffocating as any in the league. That blue line did not just prevent goals; it legitimately controlled games. It wore opponents down, being the backbone of two Stanley Cups in three years, and made Los Angeles one of the most respected organizations in hockey.

The problem is that the formula stopped working league-wide, and the Kings never fully committed to replacing it.

Kopitar retired this past offseason, leaving Drew Doughty as the last remaining player from that 2014 championship roster. Kopitar finished his final season as the team's best plus/minus at +19, which is as fitting a statistical eulogy as any. With him goes one of the most critical supporting pillars of that former championship identity, and the front office has no choice now but to decide what comes next and commit to it.

The Dubois Detour

Before examining where the Kings are, it helps to understand what they spent to get here.

In the summer of 2023, the Kings made their most aggressive move of the post-championship era, trading Gabriel Vilardi, Alex Iafallo, Rasmus Kupari, and a second-round pick to Winnipeg to acquire Pierre-Luc Dubois on an eight-year, $8.5 million AAV deal. The logic seemed obscure: find the post-Kopitar center before Kopitar was gone while developing Quinton Byfield, lock him in long-term, and build the next era of Kings hockey around two young centers with upside.

Dubois produced 16 goals and 24 points in 82 games, finished minus-9, and was moved to Washington the following summer in a one-for-one swap for Darcy Kuemper. That’s bad, akin to Milan Lucic in 2016, Andrej Sekera in 2015. 

The return, improbably, looked like organizational competence for exactly one season. Kuemper posted a 31-11-7 record with a .921 save percentage and a career-best 2.02 GAA, earning a Vezina Trophy nomination alongside Connor Hellebuyck and Andrei Vasilevskiy. That performance was the primary reason the 2024-25 Kings tied a franchise record with 105 points. The Dubois detour, for a moment, looked survivable. 

Then Kuemper got hurt in December, in a suspect collision with Mikko Rantanen in Dallas. He never recovered his form, finishing 2025-26 with a .891 save percentage and a 2.78 GAA, both below his backup's. The organizational buffer he had provided disappeared, and the structural weaknesses underneath came fully into view. The assets sent to Winnipeg never came back. Vilardi, Iafallo, and Kupari are all still playing. What the Kings extracted from that transaction was one excellent goaltending season, followed by an injury, followed by a 15-point collapse in the standings.

The League the Kings Didn't Follow

While Los Angeles was busy preserving its defensive culture, the rest of the NHL evolved past it. The modern premium is no longer on blueliners who lock down the defensive zone and move the puck safely. It is on defensemen who can do that and activate offensively, who have the skating ability and hockey sense to transition quickly and become legitimate threats in the attacking end.

Look at the two most successful franchises of the post-COVID era. Vegas built its blue line around players who combine physical play with genuine offensive instinct. Florida followed a similar blueprint with a defensive corps that can defend hard and still generate from the back end. Both teams have won Stanley Cups in the last three years, and both have been in the finals or rotated in for four straight years. Both play a brand of hockey that is big, mobile, and relentlessly transitional.

The Kings play hockey that is heavy, structured, and extremely careful–almost no risk involved from the backend. The blueline has been excellent at preventing goals and nearly useless at generating them, and in a league where the margin between the playoffs and the second round increasingly runs through transition offense and power play execution, careful does not cut it.

The Numbers That Tell the Story

The statistical profile of the 2025-26 Kings is a study in contradiction. They were one of the better defensive teams in the league in terms of raw goals against, finishing seventh at 238. That is a real accomplishment. But their offense ranked 29th in the NHL with 220 goals, their power play converted at 17.0 percent (28th), and their penalty kill operated at 74.6 percent (30th in the league).

A defensive-identity team finishing near last in penalty kill is not a philosophical outcome, but rather, a structural failure. It means the players running the penalty kill lack the skating and stick ability to sustain real pressure, which turns every infraction into an outsized crisis that a 17.0 percent power play couldn’t offset on the other end.

Adrian Kempe led full-season Kings scorers with 36 goals and 73 points, followed by Quinton Byfield at 49, Alex Laferriere at 44, and Brandt Clarke at 40. That 24-point gap between first and second describes a team with one load-bearing wall and not enough supporting structure. The most important asterisk in those numbers belongs to Artemi Panarin. Acquired from the Rangers in early February, he played only 26 games in a Kings uniform, posting 9 goals and 18 assists for 27 points. His 1.04 points-per-game pace with Los Angeles was the best on the roster, and he was the primary offensive engine in both wins against Colorado before the sweep closed out. The Kings have him signed through 2027-28 at $11 million AAV.

That matters because the forward group the Kings have assembled is as talented as any in their franchise’s salary cap era. Kempe, Panarin, Kevin Fiala, Laferrière, and the depth behind them represent a real top-six. But the problem has never been the wings; it has been everything behind them.

The Doughty Problem

The most uncomfortable conversation in Los Angeles right now involves Drew Doughty, and it has to be had.

Doughty is a first-ballot Hall of Famer, with two Stanley Cups, Norris Trophies, Olympic gold medals with Canada, and a career that ranks among the finest any defenseman has assembled in the salary cap era. None of that is in dispute, and none of it makes the current situation easier to navigate.

He is signed at approximately $11 million per year, a contract written for the version of Doughty who was annually in Norris Trophy conversations and driving possession at 5-on-5 through his skating and puck movement. That version of Doughty is no longer playing in the NHL. What remains is a player who can still defend, still reads the game at a high level, but has lost the foot speed and offensive activation that made the contract reasonable in the first place.

The spin-o-rama at the blue line is gone. Pulling away from forecheckers and turning defense into offense in a single stride is gone. What you see now is a mouthful: an offensively capable defensive defenseman being paid like one of the best two-way defensemen in the league.

With one year remaining on that contract, Ken Holland faces a decision that is more business than sentiment, and the Kings' ability to address the offensive backend problem will remain constrained as long as that cap number is locked in.

The Clarke Signal

Brandt Clarke is 23 years old and finished this season with 40 points from the blue line. He was the only Kings defenseman generating consistent offense from the back end, and he did it while logging real minutes against real competition despite a plethora of sheltering for most of his young career. A top-10 overall pick, Clarke has moved past that deployment phase. He is showing exactly what the Kings hoped when they drafted him: a puck-moving, skating defenseman with the offensive instinct the rest of the blue line fundamentally lacks.

Despite some promising signs being elevated to the first powerplay unit, the Kings have spent two seasons asking Clarke to be patient in a system not built for him. The next step is building the system around him instead. That means accepting what Doughty is now rather than what he was, committing to Clarke as the number-one defenseman, and finding partners who complement his game rather than pull the group back toward the past.

The same logic extends to Byfield. His 49-point season is acceptable for a player still developing into his role, but he should be the unquestioned first-line center and offensive engine going forward. The Kings have two legitimate building blocks in Clarke and Byfield. The question is whether the organizational culture is actually ready to hand them the keys, or whether it will keep hedging toward the veteran identity that has produced five consecutive first-round exits.

Laviolette and What It Means

The Laviolette hire is not a minor adjustment. His 846 career wins rank seventh all-time. His teams have reached the postseason in 11 of the 14 seasons he has finished behind a bench, and he is a Stanley Cup winner with Carolina in 2006. He took Philadelphia to the Final in 2010 and Nashville in 2017. He is comfortable with young rosters, comfortable with veteran leadership, and comfortable with an uptempo style that is, by design, incompatible with the defensive rigidity the Kings have been running for the better part of a decade.

The Kings did not hire Laviolette to maintain what they have. They hired him because what they had stopped working, and because his coaching profile signals a genuine willingness to play differently. The Panarin acquisition points in the same direction, as the star Russian forward had his best statistical seasons under Laviolette in New York. This is a front office that believes it is close and is making moves to prove it, and for the first time in a while, the forward group being handed to a new coach is actually equipped to play a different style.

Whether that belief is fully warranted is a legitimate debate. A team that dropped 15 points in the standings and was swept in four games is not a minor adjustment away from anything. They have a center issue and a defensive core issue that both need to be addressed. The organizational optimism reads partly as ambition and partly as a refusal to acknowledge how much ground was lost in a single season, and how much the Dubois misadventure cost in assets that would have made rebuilding the blue line easier.

The Choice

The Kings are not fixing everything in one offseason. But they are standing at a genuine inflection point, the kind that defines franchises for the next decade. The old identity, built on defensive suffocation and institutional caution, has run its course. Kopitar is gone, and the championship blue line is a dusty afterthought. What is left is Doughty in the final year of a contract that outlasted the player it was written for, and behind him, Byfield, Clarke, Panarin, and a wing group as talented as any in the Western Conference waiting on an organization to actually commit to them.

The losses of Vladislav Gavrikov and Jordan Spence exposed just how thin and homogeneous this blue line became. Five nearly identical defensemen who play the same way and produce the same absence of offense cannot be papered over with a coaching hire. The reconstruction has to be real, with mobility and offensive activation as the criteria rather than defensive familiarity.

Laviolette is the right hire with Clarke being the right bet. Panarin is signed and ready to work with Byfield. The work now is making sure the culture actually changes and not just the name on the office door.