The Burden of the Crown

LOS ANGELES, CA — The door has closed on the Los Angeles Kings. Anze Kopitar, the King of Kings, the man who surpassed Marcel Dionne in his final season to become the franchise's all-time points leader, played his last NHL game in a four-game sweep at the hands of the Colorado Avalanche. Whatever you want to call the last several years of Kings hockey, a retool, a transition, a slow-moving rebuild dressed up in playoff appearance clothing, it ended on the ice vs Colorado. There hasn't been a sexy transition to a new hockey model that has found success in LA.

This offseason does not just set the tone for next year. It draws the map for the next five years of Kings hockey, and the organization knows it, considering the tone of the exit interviews. 

The contemporary history of the Kings in the wake of its championship era has not been kind. Rob Blake's era had its opportunities and squandered them. After two Stanley Cups, the Kings cycled through the end of the Dean Lombardi regime and into Blake's retool, only to produce a sweep at the hands of the Vegas Golden Knights and four straight first-round exits to the Edmonton Oilers. It was a core that ownership and management publicly refused to admit had aged past its window in a copycat pursuit of the Pittsburgh Penguins split core runs (09’, 16’, 17’).

The rhetoric in LA just never matched the results. Blake stepped down, Ken Holland came in, and the 2025-26 season was supposed to signal something new. It signaled that the problems were much structurally deeper than a change at the top could fix on its own.

Holland's first offseason was a mixed ledger at best. He signed Corey Perry, who was traded to Tampa Bay mid-season, quoted to the media as giving an opportunity to compete for another cup (the irony with Kopitar), recovering a pick in the process, which is the right call made necessary by the wrong call (Blake-esque). He signed Joel Armia, who finished the season as a quality depth forward and an excellent penalty killer, but was a healthy scratch for the penultimate game against Colorado, which is its own kind of verdict.

He added Cody Ceci and Brian Dumoulin to a blue line that historically doesn't generate much offense, a decision that will follow this front office the longest because those contracts do not move easily. On the other side, he brought in Scott Laughton, who was exactly what the roster needed at 3C, and Artemi Panarin. Though crediting Holland fully for that one requires ignoring that Panarin requested a trade out of New York and used his full no movement clause to identify LA as his destination. Holland facilitated it, but the asset chose them.

The result of all of it was a team that scraped into the playoffs on the back of a weak division and a soft back half of the schedule. They got swept by the league’s best and watched Kopitar skate off the ice for the last time. It actually might not get rosier than that. Holland now owns this roster. What he does this summer is his ‘second test’, and the first one did not inspire overwhelming confidence.

Byfield Is the Guy. Now Prove It.

The cleanest and most important thing to come out of this season is that Quinton Byfield is the center of this franchise going forward. DJ Smith sang high praises for the young center at the tail end of their four-game dusting at the hands of the Avs.

Anyone who watched the last ten to fifteen games of the regular season and the playoff series against Colorado saw it. Byfield carried this team into the postseason. After a quiet game one, he was one of their best players against the Avalanche despite their team being greatly outmatched in every single hockey category, producing only two five-on-five goals across four games. Two.

The criticism around Byfield's offensive output is fair in a vacuum. But it has never existed in a vacuum. This is a player who has spent the better part of his Kings career without a true top-six winger next to him at even strength. Outside the season and a half during which he was groomed alongside Kopitar and Adrian Kempe, Byfield has been handed Tanner Jeannot, Warren Foegele, and Alex Laferriere. Laferriere projects as a useful top-nine forward but not the kind of elite winger that unlocks what Byfield is capable of. He has gone through stretches of real dominance alongside Kevin Fiala, who is legitimately that player, but consistency in linemates and the overall quality have never been a luxury afforded to him.

Some perspective: he’s now had back-to-back seasons with full-time center duties, a career high in points in one and a career high in goals in the other, while managing back-to-back oblique injuries. The runway for next year is clear.

The landscape for Byfield changes next year, and it changes significantly. Panarin is there, even at 35, and Panarin at 35 is still a top ten winger in the NHL, even on the skeptical end of the argument. Kempe is right there amongst the better wingers in the league. Fiala will also be back from injury. Run the list, and you have Panarin, Kempe, Fiala, Laferriere, and Trevor Moore rounding out a top nine wing group that is, without exaggeration, as good as any in the league. That also assumes they let Andrei Kuzmenko walk, and judging purely off the exit interviews, it’s a possibility. 

Byfield has never had that capacity next to him on the ings, and next year he will. He will assume the Kopitar mantle on the powerplay as well. He will also be 24, still ascending, and locked into 20-plus minutes a night as the unquestioned number one center on this roster. This is the season where the offensive question either gets answered or becomes a legitimate concern. Everything around him will finally be set up so he can answer it.

The only scenario that changes is if Holland makes the massive move discussed ad nauseam on social media, packaging Byfield and multiple first-round picks to acquire Auston Matthews from Toronto. That would be removing a Band-Aid to reveal the same wound underneath. You upgrade from Byfield to Matthews, which is a legitimate, real upgrade, and then you are left with Laferriere as your 2C, Scott Laughton, if re-signed as your 3C, a middle of the lineup that is somehow worse than the one you just had in 2025-26. I don't believe the franchise's goal is to marginally improve a team that barely scraped into the playoffs and just got swept.

That is not a trade worth making, and it is certainly not worth gutting the future over. For those already thinking this way, having a roster that houses both Byfield and Matthews remains, at best, a pipedream nested under the guise of running a franchise on a gaming system.

The Center Problem Beneath It All

Byfield is the 1C, whether he is fully ready or not. What is not settled is everything below him, and that is where this offseason gets complicated fast.

Laughton needs to be re-signed. That is not a discussion.

There are rumors that Laughton has expressed interest in returning to Toronto, where former teammates have made clear they want him back, and that is a legitimate threat. But losing Laughton does not just create a vacancy; it exposes how genuinely thin this organization is at center beyond Byfield. If he walks, you are looking at Laferriere as your 2C, a natural winger who has not shown the ability to handle top-line matchups or consistently drive play in that role, or Alex Turcotte, a player with a rich history of injury and playing time inconsistency that has made it impossible to count on him as a full-time option. Samuel Helenius exists in a depth role to terrorize on the forecheck. 

That is your center group without Laughton. Even slightly overpaying to keep him is the obvious call this offseason.

Resign him, and he is your penciled-in 3C who plays that role as well as anyone at that level. He is not a 2C solution, as Danault played into during his early tenure in LA, but he is the floor that makes the rest of the lineup functional. Losing him removes the floor entirely and forces management to reassess the possibility of pivoting towards an actual teardown.

Which brings the real question into focus. This team needs a legitimate 2C, not Laferriere pressed into a role he was not built for, not a project. An actual second-line center who can handle matchups, drive play, and take real defensive zone starts. That acquisition, whether through trade or free agency, is quite possibly the most important move of the offseason. The 2026 first-round pick almost certainly has to be involved to make it happen. 

What Holland decides to do with that pick will say more about the direction of this franchise than anything else he does this summer.

However..

The Blue Line Is the Real Problem

Here is the part that does not have a clean answer.

The Kings' defensive core is the structural anchor dragging this franchise, and Holland made it worse in his first offseason. Drew Doughty, Mikey Anderson, Cody Ceci, Joel Edmundson, and Brian Dumoulin make up the bulk of a blue line that struggles to transition the puck in the modern NHL. The anti-fleet-of-foot core is very much a ‘rim it, glass it out, regroup, and force the forwards to chip and chase’. They do not burn teams that overextend in the offensive/neutral zone because they are not built to do so. The Kings finished with a negative goal differential this season; they were not good at five-on-five (a lynchpin of this club), and that blueline was a massive part of that. They have suffocated opponents defensively for the better part of a half-decade, but the Holland era blueline translated into low-scoring losses where the forward group overexterts to support the defenseman, they cannot transition, and the other team eventually finds a way.

The contract situation makes it exceedingly worse. Doughty is owed eleven million dollars in the final year of his deal, a number that understandably had its arc, even if the back half has strained their financial capacity. Anderson, Edmundson, Ceci, and Dumoulin carry modified no movement clauses that give them significant leverage over where they can be moved, and the realistic answer to who is acquiring any of them at their current price tags is essentially no one. What team is lining up for expensive, rather immobile shutdown defensemen who cannot transition the puck in today's increasingly higher pace NHL? That question does not have a good answer, and it is a question Holland created for himself by adding Ceci and Dumoulin in his first offseason.

Brandt Clarke is the exception and the only real source of optimism on the blue line. Clarke is 22, with genuine puck-moving ability and something the blue line utterly lacks—lateral movement at the point —and he needs to be the number one defenseman on this team now. The problem is that he is still sharing that load with Doughty, who, by all accounts, should be transitioning into a complementary role rather than leading minutes. That correction needed to happen during this season, but it is now thrust upon as a necessity for next.

More importantly, if the organization can find a way to move even one of the anchored contracts and bring in a mobile defenseman who can actually push the puck, the entire blue line conversation shifts. If they cannot, the forward group upgrades will hit the same ceiling they hit this season while dragged down by the blueline.

The Goaltending Problem

Darcy Kuemper had a Vezina nominee season in 2024-25. It was exceptional, and it was also played behind a defensive core that still had Vladislav Gavrikov and Jordan Spence, which matters more than it gets credit for. This season, he suffered an injury in Dallas and was never the same, and the Kings turned to Anton Forsberg down the stretch and into the playoffs. Forsberg, by every metric, is a career backup, but he was exceptional when called upon and made a sweep look marginally better than it was, which is its own kind of commentary.

Forsberg will be 34 next season, and Kuemper will be 36. That is not a sustainable situation for the crease without a clear successor, particularly when the Kings actually have the prospect depth to address the crease's future better than almost any team in the league. Hampton Slukynsky and Carter George have legitimate number one upside. Erik Portillo exists in that pipeline as well, though health has been a recurring issue. The caveat, and it is an important one, is that goaltending prospects are voodoo. Jack Campbell was a first-round pick, 11th overall, in 2010 by Dallas. There are no guarantees. But one of these goalies needs to be in the conversation for the backup role next season at minimum, with a clear line toward taking over the starter role as Kuemper's window closes. The transition has to start somewhere, and the current tandem's age makes it non-negotiable.

The Offseason That Defines the Next Five Years

Put it all together, and here is what you have. A wing group that is genuinely elite and largely intact, that could and should be weaponized. A franchise center tag-test next season in Byfield, who is ascending and will finally have the weapons around him to show what he really is. A center position below him that is one Laughton departure away from being genuinely alarming. A blue line that is the worst transitioning unit in the NHL, locked into expensive contracts with limited mobility, and made worse by Holland's own additions in his first offseason. A goaltending situation aging out in real time, with prospects ready to step in if the organization trusts them. Under all the noise, a 2026 ‘teener’ first-round pick sitting in the middle of all of it as the decision Holland cannot avoid.

There is a window teetering between open and closed. Byfield and Clarke are young enough, the wing group is good enough, and the prospect pipeline, despite its viability and thinness, has enough to grease this organization's wheels forward. But the decisions made this offseason are not just about next year's standings. They are about whether the Kings enter this new era with a coherent plan, or whether they do what this front office has repeatedly done: paper over structural problems with surface-level additions and call it progress.

Resign Laughton and chase a center to play under Byfield. Hand Clarke the number-one role and stop pretending Doughty can carry it at $11 million a year. Move one of the immobile blueline contracts if you can find a taker and use that cap space on someone who can actually skate the puck out of the zone. If not, a buyout should be under consideration. Bring one of the goaltending prospects into the fold before the situation forces your hand. Use the first round as the focal point for implementing the plan.

The Kopitar era is over, and while the player isn't connected to this, the era of excuses should be, too. The pieces are there to pivot back into the conversation. The opportunity cost of getting this wrong is five more years of what you just watched. 

If not, there is the easy way out—tear it all down. The hard part is building it back up again.