Credit © Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn ImagesSAN DIEGO, CA — There are some David and Goliath scenarios that occur each Stanley Cup Playoff. An eighth seed, the second wildcard spot, will play the best regular-season team in the conference, or, for one Western or Eastern wildcard teams, the best in the league. The President's Trophy winner, aka the best regular-season team, has been cursed over the last ten years.
Now, for the Los Angeles Kings, the lowest point-accruing team to qualify for the playoffs, they will play the Colorado Avalanche, the league standard. The David-and-Goliath narrative notwithstanding, there is a gap in talent and overall ability between the two teams that hasn't been on display in quite some time.
See, the National Hockey League has parity like no other. Any team can beat you on any given night, though winning four out of seven is a haul for an underdog. There's a reason pundits and fans alike will point to 2019 and 2023 as reasons not to sleep on the eighth seed. Two regular-season record-setting performances were both literally swept aside by Columbus and Florida, respectively. Columbus didn't go on a deep run, but Florida went on to start off their back-to-back championship runs.
Go back a little farther than ten years, and there are these LA Kings in 2012, beating the Presidents' Trophy-winning Vancouver Canucks in the first round, a team with pieces on the cusp of springing a perennial contending team. The Kings opened up a 3-0 series lead, a common theme during their run to the franchise's first cup, having a hiccup in game four, before closing out in overtime in Vancouver for game five, courtesy of Jarret Stoll finishing off a night that sent the hockey world into a quiet shock.
Well, let's close down that comparison. The 2012 Kings team was an exceptional core surrounded by a supporting cast that oozed experience and prime ability. Jonathan Quick, Anze Kopitar, and Drew Doughty were 26, 24, and 22, respectively, entering as the top three leaguewide in their respective positions. The skeleton surrounding that core three was made up of players like Justin Williams, Dustin Brown, Mike Richards, Jeff Carter, Stoll, Willie Mitchell, Slava Voynov, and a late playoff joiner due to injury, Simon Gagne. With respect to this year's club, it isn't remotely the same.
The 2012 team underperformed and reset with Darryl Sutter at the helm, loaded up at the deadline with Carter, and added Dwight King and Jordan Nolan to reignite their lineup. The 2025-26 Kings have performed almost exactly as expected, given their roster constraints, poor management decisions over the last five seasons, and inability over the last few seasons to fully hand the keys over to the youth. They are fortunate to get in, mostly due to a weak division and only four truly threatening Central teams, a divisional moniker that typically sends five teams to the playoffs each season.
Colorado may not have the holy trinity that the Kings had from 2012 to 2014, but they do have two pieces and an array of supplemental support that is the envy of any club left standing. Nathan MacKinnon is a top-three center in the league, and Cale Makar is a top-three defenseman. Both players in their prime, both champions in 2022. Do the current Kings have any top players in any position? Kopitar might land in the top 25, depending on how you view the top 25. Is he better than any of the 16 playoff teams' top centers? I don't see that. Doughty? Out of the 16 playoff teams, where does he land in that group?
On the flip side, Quinton Byfield is 23, and Brandt Clarke is 22, similarly positioned to their predecessors when they were thrust into championship contention. However, in 2012, Kopitar hadn't just become the leading TOI forward over a 38-year-old center, and that goes for Doughty as well, though he started to split time with Voynov as a 1A/1B combo.
That puts the Kings in a unique position. A mediocre team, despite a fall into your lap acquisition of Artemi Panarin from the Rangers at the deadline, a move that the front office probably needed more than the players did to justify the season, has made the playoffs only to face a buzzsaw of a team, despite the Presidents' Trophy curse. The same Avalanche won it all with the trophy in 2022, so take that for what it's worth.
Game one in Denver will be the 20th career playoff game for Byfield, and just the seventh for Clarke. Small sample for both, but it's the quality of the minutes that matters, particularly for Byfield. The young center has seen 103 minutes at five-on-five against Leon Draisaitl and 90 minutes against Connor McDavid. Those are two of the best, if not the best, in McDavid. Clarke has yet to play as the number one defenseman on a playoff roster, but Byfield is at least tasked as the number one center and will be seeing another top-three center to add to his playoff resume in MacKinnon, without the arsenal on the wings that a typical top-line center gets.
That is a tough draw, and it will likely be every night of this series, even with Scott Laughton available. Byfield is the only center on that roster who will limit the burn. MacKinnon has seen 24:58 of Byfield at five on five the last two seasons, whereas Kopitar is 22:07. Laughton is just north of 13 minutes against MacKinnon over the last three seasons, and the ice was heavily tilted in favor of the speedy Avs forward.
There's also Brock Nelson to deal with, and Nazem Kadri. They will have their hands full.
The experience is a welcome externality of making the playoffs with a legitimately poorly constructed roster, and that experience can be weaponized in the postseason as the Kopitar era comes to an end. Kopitar had six total playoff games to his name going into that 2011-12 playoff run, and Doughty had 12. Eighteen combined, compared to the 33 plus games Clarke and Byfield will have logged at the end of this postseason, however long it turns out to be.
Expectations are low, and stating them plainly isn't pessimism; it's just reading the room. This series going more than five games would be a genuine surprise. But with the stakes set that low, what exactly is there to lose? Let Byfield and Clarke absorb every shift, every line match, every adjustment Colorado throws at them. The Kopitar era is coming to a close.
What comes next is already in that room. May as well let it start now.