(The 2019-20 NHL season is almost here so it’s time to look at all 31 teams. We’ll be breaking down strengths and weaknesses, looking at whether teams are better or worse this season and more!)
For more 2019-20 PHT season previews, click here.
Better or worse: A lot of things went wrong for the Kings a year ago, and it wasn’t just a lack of talent around the top players. The top players also had their own issues. Drew Doughty was awful. Jonathan Quick was one of the worst goalies in the league. Even the always dependable Anze Kopitar had one of his worst seasons in the league. Put it all together and it was a miserable season for the Kings. Bounce-backs from that trio alone should be worth a few extra wins, especially when it comes to Quick. Will that be enough to make a dent in the playoff race? Probably not, but they should be a little better just because it may not be possible to be any worse.
Strengths: If the big three of Kopitar, Doughty, and Quick can rebound the Kings still have two top-tier players (Kopitar and Doughty) and a pretty good goalie. They may not be what they were during their peak in the Stanley Cup years, but they can still make an impact. While the Kings’ front office has not really taken drastic steps to accelerate the rebuild by trading many veterans, they still have still managed to put together an impressive farm system that was only strengthened this offseason with the additions of Alex Turcotte and Arthur Kaliyev.
Weaknesses: While they have a promising farm system, a lot of the prospects are still a year or two away from making a noticeable impact in the NHL. So for the short-term the team is simply lacking talent at the NHL level, while the players they will be counting on the most are closer to the end of their careers than their peak. Kopitar, Quick, Dustin Brown, Jeff Carter, and Ilya Kovalchuk are all over the age of 32; Doughty turns 30 this season. Offensively, the Kings have been a stale, dull team that has significantly fallen behind the rest of the league for a few years now. Even in their most recent playoff appearance they seemed to be playing a different sport than the Vegas team that shut them down. The young players coming through the pipeline might help change that in future, but it will not be this season.
[MORE: 2018-19 Review | X-factor | Under Pressure | Three Questions]
Coach Hot Seat Rating (1-10, 10 being red hot): Todd McLellan takes over behind the bench, and while it would not be unheard of for a coach to get fired after just one year, it would take a pretty spectacular failure this season for him to not get at least a couple of years. So we will put his rating at a 2 out of 10.
Three most fascinating players: Kovalchuk, Quick, and Jaret Anderson-Dolan.
Kovalchuk is worth watching just to see if he still has anything left at the NHL level. His return to the league after a five-year run in the KHL was a disappointment, and he never seemed to fit in with the Kings’ previous coaching staff. Will a fresh start under McLellan help? Can he still be a 25-30 goal threat? The Kings need anything they can get offensively.
Quick has always been fascinating because his reputation across the league has always exceeded his actual performance. That reputation comes from his postseason play between 2012 and 2014 when the Kings were always playing for the Stanley Cup. To be fair, he was legitimately great in those postseasons. But if you look at his career as a whole his yearly performance hasn’t always matched that. He’s been a consistently good, but not always great starter. And that’s fine. You can win with that. You can not win with what the Kings received from Quick a year ago, which was one of the worst performances in the league.
Anderson-Dolan might be one of the young players in the organization that gets a chance to make an impact this season. The 2017 second-round pick had a five-game cup of coffee at the start of the 2018-19 season before being sent back to his junior team (where he excelled). His goal is to play the entire season in the NHL, and he just might get a chance to do that on a team that really needs some playmaking and talent down the middle.
Playoffs or lottery: The Kings might be a little better, but unless Quick and Jack Campbell play out of their mind in goal for 82 games the playoffs seem to be a real long shot for this team. That means it is back to the lottery.
MORE:
• Kopitar on Kings’ season to forget, playing for McLellan
• ProHockeyTalk’s 2019 NHL free agency tracker
• Your 2019-20 NHL on NBC TV schedule
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Adam Gretz is a writer for Pro Hockey Talk on NBC Sports. Drop him a line at phtblog@nbcsports.com or follow him on Twitter @AGretz.