Kings Committed To Turning It Around + Today’s Practice Alignment & Clarke Season Debut

I liked Kevin Fiala’s answer after last night’s game, when asked about how teams pull through situations like they’re currently in.

“It’s us. We’re going to have to work to get out of this, just us, together. The players, the coaching staff all of that, but I’m not scared about it. We’re going to be better.”

Fiala isn’t the most experienced player on the LA Kings, but he’s been around the block a few times. He’s been on a team that won the Presidents Trophy and he’s been on a team that has missed the playoffs. He’s been through the ups and the downs and when he’s been a part of a team that’s come through the downs on the other side, he’s seen how those stretches can build character within a group and ultimately make a team better in the long run.

“At the end of the year, you look at those moments and that’s what good character teams bring back,” he expanded. “You’re not going to win everything. I’ve been with Nashville when we won the President’s Trophy, we’d been winning a lot and then the playoffs came, we lost a couple and we didn’t know what to do. It’s sometimes positive to lose and it sounds maybe weird, but now, we just have to be better next game and just get back to winning.”

That’s the place the Kings are in right now.

This is a team that – an injury to Viktor Arvidsson aside – didn’t have all that much go wrong over the first two months of the season. They couldn’t lose on the road. When they did lose a game or two at home, they typically got right back on the horse and responded. Goals were flowing freely and if there was maybe one forward line that was off on a given night, it was just one line. The others were there to pick up the slack.

Of late, not all of those variables have fallen into place, especially over the course of 60 minutes.

“Playing a perfect game doesn’t exist, we fully expect to make mistakes,” Todd McLellan said this morning. “Sometimes your goaltender can cover some of it up, sometimes we have to cover some of it up. We haven’t been doing our job in that area, it hasn’t been near as precise as it was earlier in the year. So we’ve got to get back to valuing it.”

Now, it hasn’t been a disaster over the course of these five games.

Five-game losing streaks are not acceptable to this group, but the games individually haven’t been blowouts or anything like that.

The Kings held two-goal leads against Edmonton and Detroit and twice led by a single goal last night in Washington. The Vegas game was competitive and the Toronto game was a rare clunker. The showing against the Maple Leafs aside, the Kings have been competitive and have put themselves in position to win at least a couple of those games, even if it hasn’t come through for them.

“We’re not getting blown out, but we just keep coming up on the losing side and it’s little mistakes here and there that are killing us right now,” forward Trevor Moore said. “We’ve got to find a way to clean those up while still maintaining the offense. We have to put the puck in the net, but we can’t keep letting the other team score 4 or 5.”

Before yesterday’s game, McLellan referenced the notion of “moments” within a game, as the Kings looked to turn those two-goal leads into three-goal leads.

It’s something he said he’s spoken about in the locker room with the team as well and something he spoke with the media about in Washington.

“A lot of times there’s nothing going on until there’s something going on and those ‘something moments’, we were taking care of at the beginning of the year, with a lot of success on both sides of the puck,” he said. “Now, we’re just a ‘take care of’ moment or a ‘play’ moment behind. We’ve been up 2-0 in a lot of games and we failed to get to three and then anything can happen. Early in the year, we were getting to three and then you’ve got a bit of a cushion.”

Last night was a bit different, even if there were elements of the same concepts as Kings lost in Washington.

The Kings fell behind 1-0 early in the second period but played a pretty strong period to battle their way back ahead. It was a period in which they should’ve taken a lead into the intermission, but a turnover and a goal against, and suddenly it’s 2-2. The Kings then scored on the power play just 61 seconds into the third period to pull back ahead 3-2. You never know if the game flows the same way at 2-1 as 2-2, but could that have been the cushion that was needed? Even at 3-2, the Kings hit a crossbar at one end and one shift later, it’s in their net and sudddenly it’s 3-3.

Whether it’s been moments in games, individual mistakes or just missed opportunities – they’re all a bit different – these are the things that the Kings took full advantage of in November that aren’t going their way now. It’s a part of the game they know they want to change, from the coaching staff down to the players.

“We’re not off the hook as a staff either, I’ll make that real clear, we’re not just pinpointing it on individuals, we [the coaches] have to make sure that the group is playing a well-connected and structured game,” McLellan added. “But, when it’s an individual turnover or something like that, for a 2-on-0 going the other way, it’s hard to show that in front of the group and say ‘hey guys, we need to do this’. It’s really not we it’s an I in that situation. The last thing that any coaching staff or team wants to do is start separating we from I, so those are really hard coaching moments, those are done more individually than they’re done collectively. Now, if your forecheck is slow, d-zone coverage is sloppy over and over again, that’s a we thing and that’s easy to show to get after the group as a whole to try and fix. We have a combination of both scenarios going right now.”

Kicking off the work week 👨‍💼 pic.twitter.com/RkAVuiKgT3

— LA Kings (@LAKings) January 8, 2024

As far as today’s practice went, the Kings hit the ice for about 25-30 minutes, got their work in on a couple of areas and generally speaking the bulk of the group was off the ice.

Lots of games to come here and that brings a balance as it pertains to on-ice work with rest.

In terms of alignment, the Kings appeared to revert back a bit with regards to their forward line combinations. Not a ton of full-line work today, but based on jersey colors, it looked to be something like this.

Byfield – Kopitar – Kempe
Fiala – Danault – Moore
Laferriere – Dubois – Kaliyev
Anderson-Dolan – Grundstrom – Lizotte – Lewis

After yesterday’s game, McLellan spoke a bit about the line changes the Kings have made over the last two games. It’s something that was done to hopefully provide a spark to the group. In some ways it has. With others, the chemistry hasn’t come together as well. McLellan also made it clear when first making these changes that the Kings always had these lines to fall back on, should they want to. They didn’t go anywhere and the Kings have full personnel at their disposal. Today saw a reverting back, but we’ll see what tomorrow looks like.

With the defensemen, it’s a group of seven and it was difficult to get a read on pairings today.

Last game, we saw the Kings insert Brandt Clarke into the lineup for his season debut, the tenth game of his NHL career. Clarke logged 15:43 last night against Washington, quarterbacking the second power-play unit. He was on the ice in the game’s final minutes, with the Kings down a goal.

“It was definitely an adjustment from what I’ve been doing this season, role wise and minutes wise, but I think, overall, it was a pretty solid job,” he said this morning.

Todd McLellan pointed to similar things when it came to Clarke’s game, with it being a difficult adjustment for him, especially coming into the lineup at a time when the Kings are struggling as a group.

“He’s coming into a time right now where the team is not winning as much as they did in the past, that’s not an easy thing to do, and he went into a scenario where he got minutes with a defenseman he hasn’t played with before,” McLellan added. “So, all of those things make it difficult for the individual, but he handled himself really well.”

McLellan added that there are moments when it comes to Clarke that he needs to continue to work on at the defensive end of the ice. He points to Assistant Coach Trent Yawney as someone who has established a good relationship with him and continues to work on him in those areas. As he continues to grow in that area, and continues to impose his offensive abilities on the game, there’s a heck of a player there. As McLellan concluded his comment on Clarke, he ended with the following.

“In my mind, he’s going to be a star in this league.”

Give it time, Insiders. Don’t react to every single moment as if it’s life or death. It isn’t. An exciting young player who will continue to grown and learn, and one who the Kings are thrilled to have.

Morning skate tomorrow at Amalie Arena, where the Kings will look to get things back on track in a building that has not been kind to them in recent years. Awaiting is a Tampa Bay squad that’s encountered it’s own share of ups and downs this season, but brings as much high-end talent as any team in the NHL. A difficult matchup, but one that the Kings know they need to have to get things back on course.