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Kings must ‘wake up’ versus defending champion Panthers

Stung from perhaps their worst showing of the season, the Kings regrouped for Wednesday’s meeting with the Florida Panthers, who entered the campaign with designs on a second straight Stanley Cup and third consecutive Eastern Conference crown.

Kings captain Anže Kopitar and coach Jim Hiller felt their team’s effort in a 5-1 loss to the Pittsburgh Penguins on Monday may have been its poorest of the year.

“Over a long season, you usually say that [the team didn’t compete hard enough] too many times, and we haven’t had to say that much this year,” Hiller said. “So, we’ll come back against the defending Stanley Cup champions, and if that doesn’t wake you up and get you ready to play, I don’t know what does.”

Kopitar also emphasized that despite the lopsided loss – which was the Kings’ fourth defeat in five games, their weakest stretch yet this season from a win-loss perspective – the Kings understood that they remained in a position of strength. They still possessed the sixth-best points percentage in the crowded West and ranked ninth in the NHL.

“We’re happy with the season so far. We’re sitting in a good spot. But we can’t let this go (from) two to three to four, we’ve got to nip it now,” Kopitar said.

However, at the start of their minor funk, the Kings were fourth league-wide in points percentage, and had closed the 2024 calendar year with two high-scoring wins, a 4-3 overtime triumph over Edmonton and a 5-4 victory against Philadelphia.

Of late, their offense has been lacking fiber, having tied for the fewest goals in 2025 with the slumping Vancouver Canucks, whom the Kings beat 5-1 on Thursday to buoy their anemic numbers and avert a five-game skid.

“[Our offense] is not clicking, so to speak, yeah. Not worried, per se, but, as guys, we’re aware of that, and we’ll work on it,” Kopitar said.

That awkward response surely wasn’t the sort of “uncomfortable” that Rob Blake said he hoped his players would be willing to get this season when he spoke this past offseason.

During that same summer, Blake and crew eschewed offense for unquantifiable concepts, most notably “being tough to play against.” That was in defiance of clear signs that a team that had already lost pop offensively was set to shed more with the departures of the oft-injured Viktor Arvidsson and malaise-dazed Pierre-Luc Dubois.

In fact, outside of the first three weeks of last season, the Kings have been feeble offensively. From Nov. 1 of 2023 onward, only four franchises (Chicago, Anaheim, Seattle and the Ducks) have scored fewer goals than the Kings, who allowed the second-fewest goals in that span to stay competitive.

Their latest challenge will be the Panthers, who have the next-generation model of Kopitar in Aleksander Barkov, Drew Doughty’s longtime nemesis Matthew Tkachuk and leading scorer Sam Reinhart, who escaped supplemental discipline for a cringe-inducing, knee-on-knee on Ducks forward Isac Lundeström on Saturday.

The Panthers wrapped a home-and-home set with the Ducks on Tuesday and pivoted straight into a matchup with the Kings, whom they’ll face again Jan. 29 in Florida.