SAN DIEGO, CA — When a car's tires start balding, it’s prudent to replace them, or at least get a comprehensive check, since alignment could be the issue. Well, for an NHL franchise, the diagnosis could be either that easy or rather complicated. It seems rather layered, but not that complicated at all for the Los Angeles Kings. They hired Peter Laviolette, a legitimately good signing, to take the helm for a team needing a first-year boost from an new NHL bench boss, and promised an offense that opens up from the back end despite the same set of faces. The team then sold fans on Artemi Panarin and Kevin Fiala sharing a roster and a powerplay unit for a full year.

Six games in, the Kings are 0-4-2 and the only team in the NHL without a win. Saturday's 4-1 loss to Boston gave them their longest winless start since the 1984-85 team opened 0-6-3. Oh, and by the way, Fiala hasn't played a game yet.

The details are actually much worse than the record. The Kings have scored exactly one goal in each of their last four games after their track meet show-and-tell road opener against the Avalanche. Over the five games after their licking to the Avs, they have averaged 2.2 goals for and 4.2 goals against, killed 57.9 percent of their penalties, and got sub-.860 save percentages from both Darcy Kuemper and Anton Forsberg.

The optimism here can boil down to the fact that six games out of 84 don't decide a season. This start is not a slump, though the signs of damming the bloodshed don’t look promising. It is the logical output of roster management that never got fixed, and the question it forces is simple: how deep does the hole get before the individuals at the very top who dug it admit they are in one?

Last season already told a not-so-compelling story. The Kings finished 35-27-20 and set an NHL record for losses past regulation, which doesn't sing the praises of an elite club, even though Vegas nipped at the heels of that record last season. Despite a DJ Smith interim session that became more bearable to watch in the final stretch, strip out the loser points and you're left with a 35-47 team nowhere near the playoffs.

An incessantly weak Pacific Division handed them the second wild card despite calls for a potential rebuild, or at least a heavy retool. Then the Presidents' Trophy Colorado Avalanche swept them in four games, outscoring them 13-5. It was the fifth straight first-round exit for this ‘contender’.

That team played like it was trying not to lose, and it got exactly the results that approach earns. Management looked at that season and called this roster a contender, echoing past seasons of being ‘close’ despite never being in the same air as that term.

When a team stalls this hard and if it prolongs, the typical first move is usually behind the bench. But in this instance, the Kings already made it. Jim Hiller lost his job last season, DJ Smith finished it as interim, and Peter Laviolette arrived this summer.

That leaves management without its easiest scapegoat. Laviolette has coached six games. Firing him now would not only be disastrous, but would also admit the problem was never the coach, and the Kings are locked into his plan whether it fits this roster or not.

Laviolette said the Kings would open up offensively from the back end. Holland inherited a poor schematic, but that doesn't excuse him for handing Laviolette the same back end that became dead weight last season. The system changed, but the personnel running it did not.

Rob Blake left Ken Holland a roster layered with bad decisions. Blake paid real assets for Pierre-Luc Dubois and gave him an eight-year deal, then had to swap him for Darcy Kuemper a year later, a previous theme he relied on: making recuperation-style moves to fix his poor ones (see Cal Peterson’s). He held Matt Roy at the deadline and watched him walk for nothing, since, once again, the team built that season was ‘right there’.

A new general manager inherits those decisions. His job is to correct them and instead, Holland compounded them.

Vladislav Gavrikov and Jordan Spence were moved out of a blue line that needed both; then the holes were patched with Cody Ceci and Brian Dumoulin. Phillip Danault, one of, if not the most important, pieces that pulled the Kings out of purgatory in 2021, asked out and returned to Montreal. The Kings walked away from Andrei Kuzmenko.

This summer Holland doubled down on age. He signed Erik Haula at 35, Mats Zuccarello at 39, and gave Corey Perry a second stop at 41. These moves typically boost a roster on a contender run, not integral roster pieces. The Kings are now amongst the oldest rosters in the league. Every move, with some limited exceptions, threaded a small needle. None of them changed the team's shape.

Kings defensemen scored 23 goals last season, last in the NHL, and their 133 points ranked 30th. It is the clearest weakness on the roster, and it is the one Holland touched least while bringing on Laviolette to attempt to pry more out of an outdated group.

His answer was Erik Gustafsson, a 34-year-old on a one-year, $1 million deal who spent most of last season with AHL Grand Rapids and played two NHL games. Gustafsson moves the puck, and he has history with Laviolette. But again, the solution is a seventh defenseman profile, not a fix. The core personnel remains unchanged from the season before.

So the Kings keep trusting the Drew Doughty factory. Doughty is the 15th captain in franchise history, and none of this knocks on him wearing the C. Change the captain and the problem stays the same: Laviolette runs a system built on mobility and creation with the league's least mobile, least creative D corps. It is a listless sail on a ship that will not move.

Holland's best move fell into his lap. Artemi Panarin asked out of New York and made it clear Los Angeles was the only place he would go. That narrowed the market to one buyer and handcuffed Rangers GM Chris Drury. Holland did not have to outbid anyone. The Kings landed Panarin in February for prospect Liam Greentree and a conditional third-round pick, with New York retaining half his salary. Holland then extended him two years at $11 million per season, through 2027-28.

That trade bought a window, not a solution. Panarin is approaching 35. Players at that age depreciate faster, and the risk of a drop-off climbs sharply starting next season. This season and last were supposed to be the best of his time in L.A for the Panarin show. He is the only Kings skater with more than one goal this year.

The rest of the roster has not met him there. The Panarin-Fiala power-play pairing that headlined the offseason hasn't happened in a single regular-season game. Anze Kopitar retired, and the Kings have no succession plan at center. I still stand by Quinton Byfield as the center to build around, but his two points against San Jose are his only production so far, which has soured my previous outlook on his runway this season. One young center and some quality wingers do not make a contender.

The newest idea swirling around social media was a goaltender. Seravalli reported on Oct. 15 that the Kings kicked the tires on Connor Hellebuyck, that Holland at least understands Winnipeg's price, and that Hellebuyck would accept a trade to Los Angeles. He carries an $8.5 million cap hit with five years left.

Since last season, the goaltending has become a real problem. Kuemper sits at an .847 save percentage, and Forsberg at .853. A three-time Vezina winner might boost those numbers even while icing a slow defensive corps in front of him.

What he wouldn’t fix is the rest. He doesn't score the goals the Kings cannot score, and he certainly doesn’t move the puck out of the zone, rescue the league's worst combined special teams, or make the roster younger. Seravalli himself notes that if the slide continues, putting a 2027 or 2028 first in the package gets hard to justify. Trading futures for a 33-year-old goalie to prop up one of the league's oldest rosters isn't a correction. It is the same reflex that built this team: spend to contend, and never ask whether you should.

It seems to be a recurring theme over the last four seasons, but the Kings sit at an inflection point, and it can still be a good one. A franchise only changes course when the evidence becomes impossible to explain away. Six games, one goal a night, and a historic winless start is that evidence.

Management, from the top down, will not entertain the word rebuild. So it keeps pushing the same buttons: a coaching change, a veteran signing, a star on a short window, and now a goalie with five years left. Each one treats a symptom, but none of them treats the roster as it should.

The team says it is here to contend, but in every literal sense of inverse opposition, the standings say last place. At some point those two statements cannot both stand, and someone in that front office has to look down and measure how deep the hole really is. How bad does it need to get for things to change?