The Kings don’t need to keep looking down the lineup for answers. Their own leaders are pointing straight to the top.
After five straight losses to open the season, Drew Doughty made it clear where he thinks the problem lives: with the players who are supposed to drive the team every night. The captain said the Kings are not failing for 60 full minutes, but the bad stretches they’re carrying are too costly to ignore.
“I’m not seeing [the lapses] from our fourth line type players, I’m seeing it from our top players,” defenseman Drew Doughty said. “That’s why we’re losing games.
Your top players need to be your best players every night and not just have flashes of brilliance. They need to play 60 minutes.”
Doughty, who leads all Kings defensemen in ice time, backed up those words by addressing the team in the locker room after Tuesday’s loss to Edmonton. His message, as he described it, was that the Kings have enough solid hockey in their games to compete, but the lapses are direct game-changers.
That showed up again against the Oilers. With Los Angeles already trailing 1-0 in the first period, Doughty’s turnover led to a penalty and the power play goal Edmonton converted.
It was only one moment, but through five games, moments like that have piled up and tilted results away from the Kings. If they were getting overwhelmed every night, the diagnosis would look different.
Instead, they’ve had stretches where they look fine before a mistake or two blows the game open in the wrong direction.
The offensive side of the story is just as stark. The Kings have not been able to score enough to absorb those mistakes, and that’s made every lapse heavier.
That’s where Adrian Kempe enters the picture. The Kings’ top goal scorer from the last several years has only one goal in five games, a power-play finish against the Sharks, and he knows that’s not enough.
He’s been active everywhere the puck is going, leading the team in shot attempts, shots on goal, scoring chances and high-danger chances, according to Natural Stat Trick. On a per-60 basis, he also sits in the NHL’s Top-10 in shot attempts and scoring chances.
The chances have been there. The results haven’t.
“The games we’ve played, we’ve worked really hard, but I think working hard in my own case isn’t good enough, I have to score goals to produce,” Kempe said. “That’s how you win games.
It’s hard to win when you score one goal a game. I can only speak for myself but I haven’t been good enough so far.
Looking forward to bouncing back, hopefully step up in those situations……I think we’ve worked really hard, just haven’t had that final touch to get some more goals. It’s costing us right now, so it’s definitely on myself to be better in that area.”
Kempe has been through scoring slumps before, and they’ve never lasted forever. He’s averaged 35 goals over the last five seasons, so the finish is still in there.
The underlying numbers suggest he’s in the right spots too. NHL Edge data puts him in the 88th percentile in time spent in all three zones, and he also rates highly in individual chances across most areas.
Still, the Kings can’t wait forever. They’ve already seen what it looks like when the goals finally show up in bunches and what it looks like when they don’t.
The overtime loss in San Jose felt like a step toward something more dangerous. The three goals over the next three games have undercut that idea quickly.
That’s part of why Tuesday’s home game against Boston looms so large. It’s the last one in Los Angeles before a five-game road trip, including four on the East Coast.
Last season, in a similar stretch, the Kings headed out with a 1-3-2 record. Right now they sit at 0-3-2, and a win would at least let them match that mark.
Boston won’t make it simple. The Bruins have taken five of their first seven games, and Doughty wasn’t interested in leaning on the quality-of-opponent excuse.
“It’s just not good enough,” he added. “The excuse of saying we played some good teams, I mean, we want to be one of those teams, right? So, we can’t be using that excuse.”
For all the talk about matchups, systems and lineup decisions, the math remains blunt: the Kings need points, and they probably need more than one goal to get them. Doughty called the next game vital and said the group believes it can respond.
“This next game is vital to our season,” Doughty said. “Obviously, the biggest game of the year, without a doubt. We need two points and we’re going to get it, I truly believe that.”
If the Kings are going to stop the slide, it starts where their captain says it should - at the top of the lineup, with the players who are supposed to set the tone.