A disaster of a season is exactly what the Kings need
If you squinted enough, you could’ve seen a path to levelling up for the Los Angeles Kings in 2026-27. They’d enjoy their first full season of Artemi Panarin feathering passes on their first line and top power-play unit. They’d get goal scorer Kevin Fiala back from the broken leg he suffered at the 2026 Olympics. Center Quinton Byfield and defenseman Brandt Clarke were poised for true breakout seasons with the best opportunities of their careers as the team’s No. 1 center and top offensive defenseman, respectively. And installing the seasoned Peter Laviolette as head coach promised more of an up-tempo attack for a team that had struggled to put enough pucks in the net in recent seasons.
The rest of us saw things differently. The Kings were the oldest team in the NHL on paper, adding extra gray to their collective beard by signing 41-year-old Corey Perry, 39-year-old Mats Zuccarello and 35-year-old Erik Haula for their forward corps. They’d said goodbye to their captain, all-time leading scorer and top shutdown center, Anze Kopitar, who retired after last season. They had a prospect pool seriously lacking juice after they surrendered Liam Greentree to the New York Rangers in the Panarin trade last season. They didn’t look much better than the team that had lost in Round 1 of the playoffs each of the previous five seasons and hasn’t won a series since 2014.
Early this season, the returns support the pessimistic line of thinking. Through eight games, the Kings sit 2-4-2, sixth in the Pacific Division, and it’s taken two straight wins even to climb that high. Eight games isn’t an enormous sample size but, as Daily Faceoff’s Paul Pidutti wrote earlier this week, in the past five seasons, only four percent of teams that accumulated fewer than eight points over their first 10 games of a season made the playoffs. The data suggest the Kings are perilously close to cooked. They’re 28th in goals per game, 27th in goals against per game, and their special teams have been atrocious, clocking in at 25th on the power play at 16.0 percent and dead last on the penalty kill at 63.0 percent. With Darcy Kuemper and Anton Forsberg not themselves in goal, the Kings sit 18th in the NHL in team save percentage. While Byfield’s defensive play has been strong, he hasn’t taken the expected offensive leap, with just one goal and two points in seven games so far this season and an upper-body injury to manage now as well.
Are the Kings actually this bad after being a playoff team five years running? Obviously not. Their actual goal differential is -9 when their expected goal differential is -0.54. Kuemper was a Vezina Trophy finalist the season before last, and Forsberg was excellent last year, so we can expect the Kings’ goaltending to normalize, which should balance the scoreboard.
But how big will the rebound actually be? After years of being an elite play-driving team, the Kings have actually slipped a bit at both ends of the ice so far this season, sitting sitting mid-pack in expected goals for and against per 60 at 5-on-5, missing the ice-tilting heyday of Kopitar up the middle. With Fiala still not back in the lineup after undergoing an additional procedure in the offseason related to his leg injury, the Kings are badly lacking finishers aside from Adrian Kempe. They rank 30th in the NHL in shooting percentage. They can try to inject energy into the lineup with AHL call-ups like Jared Wright, but no high-impact savior is coming from the farm in the near term. Daily Faceoff’s Steven Ellis ranks the Kings’ prospect pool 21st in the NHL, and none of L.A.’s actual top prospects is close to full-time NHL duty. Right winger Elton Hermansson is playing in the SHL, while defenseman Henry Brzustewicz is only beginning to cut his teeth in the AHL. The Kings’ next-best prospects on the ladder are goaltenders Hampton Slukynsky and Carter George, who are blocked at the NHL level by Kuemper and Forsberg.
In other words: the 2026-27 season is already starting to look rather grim for the Kings, and positive regression might not be enough to save them this time because their downgraded play driving will keep that regression modest.
But what if that’s a good thing? Maybe exactly what this franchise needs is a cleanse to get younger and clear cap space for a retool in the relatively near future.
Yes, retool. “Rebuild” isn’t a concept familiar to GM Ken Holland. In the decades since his peak years running the Detroit Red Wings dynasty, he has chased competitiveness on most of his rosters via veteran stopgap additions, keeping his teams in the playoffs far more often than not but rarely building them into true contenders. If the Kings can sit comfortably out of a playoff spot by the middle of winter, however, Holland’s hand could be forced, maybe not into a scorched-earth philosophy but at least into a realist mentality.
And he might be able to recoup some useful picks, prospects and/or NHL regulars with the assets he’d have in play. Versatile, physical forwards Alex Laferriere and Trevor Moore would be handy additions for playoff teams, and each has an additional year left on his deal at a palatable cap hit. Penalty killer Joel Armia, clutch veteran Perry and power-play facilitator Zuccarello are all on expiring deals and would make for no-brainer rentals across the league. Kuemper and Forsberg are also pending UFAs and have more than enough experience and past success for a goaltending-starved team to covet either of them. And then there’s the Drew Doughty conversation. The most accomplished defenseman in franchise history wants to stay a King for life, but he’s also a gamer, and the Kings notably didn’t re-sign him entering his walk year. Could he decide to accept a trade to one of the seven teams on his list and chase a Stanley Cup?
The Kings roster is quietly in a sweet spot right now in which Holland has an opportunity to purge his veteran assets, many of whom would have legitimate trade value. A step backward in the standings and a pivot to a seller posture could help the Kings replenish their draft-pick cupboard; they don’t own a third- or seventh-round pick in 2027. If they decided to get really aggressive and check if Panarin would waive his no-movement clause, the return he’d bring could help them follow the lead of many retooling teams in recent years who loaded up with multiple first-round picks in the same draft. Think about how rapidly the New York Islanders and Calgary Flames, for instance, have transformed their prospect crops from below average to some of the best and deepest in the league. And if L.A. truly bottoms out: we’re looking at some legitimate odds to win the 2027 Draft Lottery and pray for the ping-pong ball that lands them Landon DuPont at first overall.
Not only would a fire sale help net the Kings the capital to get a lot younger, but it would set their payroll up extremely favorably as the cap continues to skyrocket. Even now, the Kings have more than $36 million available for 2027-28, per PuckPedia. That number could grow a lot more if Holland deals any players with term remaining. The 2027 free-agent class has already dwindled, but we need to rewire our brains and understand that weaponized cap space is just as handy for trades as it is for signings nowadays. Los Angeles will always have appeal as a market; it offers great weather and relative obscurity for its athletes, and stars will never stop wanting to play there. A Kings team with a ton of spending space freed up could chase anyone from Zach Werenski to Quinn Hughes, depending on who’s available and/or restless in his market by next summer.
If the Kings want a template to follow: look at what the Rangers did last season and last offseason. They cashed out Panarin to add a high-end prospect in Greentree; turned Vincent Trocheck into defenseman Sean Durzi and another prospect in Cole Beaudoin; traded for Marcus Pettersson; and drafted Alberts Smits in Round 1. The Rangers now have a new top three on their prospect board and a revamped D-corps, and they used their newfound cap space to acquire and extend sniper Pavel Dorofeyev. They look much more competitive early this season.
If the Kings similarly embrace not being a playoff team this season, they could continue building around Byfield, Clarke, Kempe, defenseman Mikey Anderson and maybe or maybe not Panarin, injecting the club with some exciting young assets and freeing themselves up to go big-game hunting with their newfound cap space.
Sometimes, a step backward is the best path forward.
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