Midseason analysis: coaching and management

It’s not feasible or wise to try to lump coaching and management together, so we’ll take them piece by piece…

First, the coaching. The only difference from last season was the addition of assistant coach John Stevens, in place of Mark Hardy. There is a difference there, though. They’re both defensive-minded coaches, but it seemed that Hardy was more vocal while Stevens takes more of a teacher role. Terry Murray set forth this season with two clear objectives, in no particular order. One, he wanted to give fewer starts to goalie Jonathan Quick, in order to avoid the situation last season in which Quick started 72 games and seemed to fade late in the season. Murray has succeeded there. Two, Murray wanted to open things up offensively, improve the Kings’ 5-on-5 scoring, in particular, and tweak his system so that forwards were more confident, and successful, in carrying the puck into the offensive zone. There have been mixed results there, at best. For the most part, the Kings remain a chip-and-chase team, and when they are able to control the puck and cycle it, they are extremely effective. But the net presence — one of Murray’s favorite buzz terms — has been inconsistent. The Kings don’t have the most skilled group of forwards, so if they’re not causing havoc around the net, they don’t have as much success as they should. Criticism of Murray’s frequent line changing is overblown, but some of his choices — Dwight King on the first line? — have been curious at best. It’s reasonable to ask why it took 42 games for Murray to reunite Anze Kopitar, Ryan Smyth and Justin Williams, but we’ve yet to see if it will work. Murray is a calm, steady leader, and he’s right to say that yelling at his team would only make him feel better, not his players, but at some point, does this team need a jolt, just to shake things up if nothing else?

As for management, Dean Lombardi took his well-known swing at Ilya Kovalchuk last summer and didn’t connect. Perhaps that was the best thing that happened to the Kings last summer. Regardless, once Kovalchuk signed with the New Jersey Devils, twice, Lombardi put all his eggs in his young players’ basket. He added a very nice piece in veteran defenseman Willie Mitchell, and brought in a serviceable role player in Alexei Ponikarovsky, but otherwise Lombardi preached the idea that the Kings would be a better team simply because their young, talented players would be a year older, a year more experienced and a year better. Has it worked? In part. Players such as Jonathan Quick, Anze Kopitar and Dustin Brown, in particular, have stepped up, but Drew Doughty and Wayne Simmonds — while still very young, with plenty of time to improve — have been more stagnant, and a huge hole among the top-six forwards remains. Lombardi’s thought that Scott Parse could fill a top-six role was highly optimistic, and once Parse got hurt, it was clear that there was no solid Plan B. The Kings’ lineup screams for one more consistent scorer — not even a superstar; a consistent 25-to-30-goal scorer would work fine — but so far, Lombardi has been unable to bring in that piece of the puzzle. If he doesn’t, within the next month, there’s going to be a ton of pressure on these young forwards to produce.