Kings’ Rob Blake, Luc Robitaille point to ‘progress’ despite another early exit
EL SEGUNDO — The Kings’ brain trust addressed the media on Monday, although some of their statements about the disappointing season that just concluded seemed difficult to reconcile with the views of the public and, to some degree, their own players.
The Kings, a team that in seven campaigns under General Manager Rob Blake and team president Luc Robitaille has won fewer postseason games than all but three of the NHL’s 31 other franchises, endured rather than experienced this past season from December onward.
This duo of former on-ice stars whose numbers hang in the rafters of Crypto.com Arena offered mostly hazy responses that indicated there was an excellent chance that, in addition to their own controversial returns, spectators would see more of the same going forward.
“We hear our fans loud and clear right now. We know they’re disappointed. We know they want to get to the next level,” Robitaille said. “It’s not about winning one series or beating one team, it’s about getting us so that we can win that last game of the season, and that’s the Stanley Cup.”
Yet these Kings have not won even one series and have failed to beat one team, the Edmonton Oilers, three years in a row. That left them light-years from the Stanley Cup and their position has become further distanced from that prize across three playoff cameos that got shorter and shorter. Their only prior playoff appearance under Blake was in his first season as GM, a sweep by the Vegas Golden Knights in that franchise’s inaugural season.
Robitaille offered the platitude that “every team that gets in the playoffs has a chance to win.”
However, since Blake and Robitaille ascended to power, the Kings have a .273 win percentage in the postseason, worse than every other franchise except the Ducks (who were 0-4 in their lone appearance, a year after reaching the conference finals). They also have the fourth-worst offense statistically and the second-worst defense across those seven postseasons.
The NHL’s newest organization, the Seattle Kraken, has spent just three seasons in the league but in one spring it won more games and series than the Kings have under Blake and Robitaille in seven years.
Unfavorable comparisons to the rest of the league and its top outfits in particular could fill an encyclopedia, yet Robitaille compared the Kings’ five-game loss to Edmonton this year to the plight of the Carolina Hurricanes last season.
Carolina was swept out of the conference finals (not the first round) by way of four one-goal losses that included five overtime periods last season. The Kings were blown out in two games, shut out in another and earned their sole victory in overtime, ultimately blowing two leads and chasing the game that saw them eliminated. Still, Robitaille claimed the games they lost were “right there.”
Blake also said the he thought the team made “progress” during the regular season, insisting it simply did not carry over to the playoffs.
“We still believe this group has made progress in a lot of different areas, we have to find a way to get that to translate into the playoffs,” he said, later reiterating that the Kings were “making progress, [but] the progress is not showing in the playoffs.”
Yet the Kings performed very poorly against the Western Conference’s top teams and playoff clubs in general, winning just eight of 23 games against the other seven postseason qualifiers during the regular season.
They also changed coaches in February, amid a stretch that saw them go from the NHL’s most productive offense to its seventh-least potent one from Dec. 5 onward.
Not only did their game snowball into an avalanche in January, but their goaltending struggled, with 36-year-old Cam Talbot’s game falling off a cliff despite having been named an All-Star. He recovered, but struggled again in the postseason. In both cases, backup David Rittich ameliorated a dire situation but hardly provided a concrete answer, as the goalies played musical nets in both the regular season and playoffs – Talbot lost his cage to Rittich and regained it, only to retrocede it after Game 3 against Edmonton.
The Kings’ power play, which interim coach Jim Hiller continued to run after he was promoted, took one step back from last season (and when it improved, 5-on-5 scoring declined) during the year and did not score a single goal in the playoffs, much as the Kings’ penalty kill, which rebounded to rank second during the season, was exposed brutally during the spring.
Yet both last week’s player interviews and Monday’s executive availability indicated that there was a good chance the Kings could run it back in goal and overall. Neither Robitaille nor Blake said firmly that Hiller would be the coach next season but he appeared to be the leading candidate (more on that in “a couple weeks,” Blake said).
Significant personnel changes might be challenging because of salary cap missteps, especially given that Blake said the Kings had no intention of buying out underwhelming, overpaid pivot Pierre-Luc Dubois.
Dubois is the latest unwieldy roadblock placed in the Kings’ path by Blake, carrying on the ignominious tradition of Ilya Kovalchuk and Cal Petersen. The former was paid to go away, the latter was paid to be taken away and Dubois, now, it appears, will continue to be paid handsomely to be in the way.
Dubois, who was signed to an 8-year, $68 million contract after being acquired in a trade with Winnipeg last summer, had 40 points in 82 regular-season games and one goal and 20 penalty minutes in five playoff games.
“We need to make him better,” Blake said. “He’s had a consistent performance over his career so far and deviated from that this year. It’s up to us to help him become more productive to us.”
The cap will increase significantly for the first time since 2019, but that bump has effectively been pre-spent in dead-cap dollars (salary retention, performance bonuses and a fractional lingering penalty from the Dean Lombardi era). Edmonton was among the front offices that did something similar, but the Oilers are still playing in the playoffs and looking to add to the four series they’ve won while the Kings have been stuck in first gear.
The impression in the room Monday among reporters present was all but unanimous, such to the point that one asked Blake point blank if fans were being told that they would see more of the same next season from personnel and tactical standpoints.
“Not necessarily, I think we’re talking a little bit about systematic changes and different things that may be incorporated,” Blake responded. “We have to understand why the game didn’t translate into the playoffs.”
Two of the Kings’ most prominent offensive forces, Adrian Kempe and Kevin Fiala, expressed unequivocal support of a systemic change on the forecheck from the 1-3-1 to a 1-2-2 or 2-1-2 setup, urging a more open approach systemically.
While Blake said “I think we have to have a deep discussion on that, for sure,” he also pointed to the team’s miserly goals-against average, the third-lowest in the league, and said, “We don’t want to deviate too far from that.”
Blake gave no firm updates on unrestricted free agents-to-be, like Matt Roy and Viktor Arvidsson, nor on any of the team’s restricted free agents. He did say that pending restricted free agent Quinton Byfield would be the team’s focus, and that that prioritization was based on his importance to the club rather than any particular parameter or circumstance.
The Kings regressed in the standings and some key areas this year, and failed to sustain their limited gains against top competition nor in the most meaningful parts of the campaign. While Blake and Robitaille remained secure, there has been no shortage of despondence, dismay and displeasure among the fan base.
“It’s the same as the way players feel, there’s disappointment, frustration, difficult and anger,” Blake said. “I’m sure they feel it just like the players and we do.”