The Kings have needed some self-affirmation of late.
“We’re a good hockey team, I believe that,” center Scott Laughton said after the Kings were shut out by the Predators on Tuesday.
Their response to that second hapless home loss in a row was a third, a 5-2 dismissal by the New York Islanders, who entered the match in a funk of their own. Per stats guru Blake Warye, this is just the second instance in the past 40 years that the Kings have lost three consecutive home games by three goals or more.
Afterward, captain Drew Doughty said the answer to the Kings’ woes was “definitely” inside their dressing room.
“We just have to believe in the system, believe in the players we have here – we have great players and a great team. We will turn this around,” echoed Kevin Fiala, who made a valiant and productive return Thursday from a grisly break of his left leg nine months earlier at the Olympics.
But neither Fiala’s presence nor his positivity got the Kings’ dreadful-to-date campaign headed in a significantly better direction.
The Kins (5-10-2, 12 points) are tied for the second-fewest wins in the NHL, perilously close to being surpassed by a wayward Chicago Blackhawks squad that beat them in their only head-to-head meeting thus far.
Chicago (5-13-1, 11 points) has been without splashy blue-line addition Bowen Byram, a $12.5 million a year player now, since Oct. 13. It also saw franchise forward Connor Bedard, a $15 million man, miss half a dozen games, including five of the six in which Byram played. The Blackhawks are also the third-youngest group in the league, while the Kings are the oldest.
On Saturday, they’ll welcome another organization that entered the year thinking about lottery probabilities more than Stanley Cup odds. On paper, the rebuilding Calgary Flames (8-10-1, 17 points) were in the running for the worst roster in the NHL, but they’ve outperformed the Kings by five points in the standings.
The Kings were hoping to hang with Leon Draisaitl and Connor McDavid; Jack Eichel and Mitch Marner; and Leo Carlsson and Cutter Gauthier. So far, they’ve barely been up to speed with Joel Farabee and Matt Coronato, whose 32 points are commensurate with the combined total of Artemi Panarin and Adrian Kempe.
Calgary has also bettered the Kings head to head, winning six of the last seven meetings and eight of the past 10 despite drifting further and further from contention amid departures and pivots toward the future.
After a solid performance against Nashville, the Kings’ 29th-ranked penalty kill continued to falter, not only giving up goals at high rates and inopportune times, but quickly so. Seven of their 19 power-play goals allowed have come in the first 30 seconds of a shorthanded situation.
They still haven’t won a game in which Cody Ceci was in uniform (0-7-2) or in which Panarin didn’t score multiple points (0-10-1).
Doughty again spoke about lapses leading to poor results for the Kings. His solution to their losing ways was, simply, winning.
“Winning heals a lot of that stuff. But then when we do get that win, we need to go on a run, that’ll really get us out of it,” Doughty said. “You can’t just win one game and get out of it like that. You need to go on a winning streak, and then we’ll feel confident in [one another] and ourselves, then we’ll go on a run.”
Calgary (8-10-1, 17 points) at Kings (5-10-2, 12 points)
When: 7 p.m. Saturday
Where: Crypto.com Arena
TV: ABTV