FINAL – Kings 5, Utah Hockey Club 3 – Doughty, Laferriere, Hiller

The LA Kings came out of the break with two points, as they skated to a 5-3 victory over the Utah Hockey Club on Saturday evening at Crypto.com Arena.

The visitors opened the scoring just shy of eight minutes into the game, burying a power-play goal to take an early lead. Less than 20 seconds into the penalty, forward Nick Schmaltz sent the puck towards the net, with forward Barrett Hayton getting a deflection just in front of the net, redirecting the puck past Kings netminder Darcy Kuemper and in for his 13th goal of the season and a 1-0 advantage.

Just 28 seconds after Utah got on the board, the Kings answered back, as defenseman Drew Doughty scored his first goal of the season. After a shot from defenseman Joel Edmundson went wide of the net, forward Kevin Fiala collected the rebound and cycled up to the right point. Fiala then feathered a pass across the blueline to Doughty, who hammered a one timer through traffic and in to knot the score at a goal apiece.

For the second time in as many periods, the visitors converted on the man advantage, opening up a 2-1 lead in the middle stanza. Once again, Hayden got the goal for the Kings, converting on a rebound just outside of the crease, caused from a shot by Nick Schmaltz. Hayden’s goal gave him his second multi-goal game of the season, giving Utah a one-goal lead.

On their first power play of the game, the Kings pushed back to tie the game at two midway through the second period. Off a zone entry with speed and possession, the Kings gained the offensive blueline and got things set up. Forward Anze Kopitar, who rotated to the center point, laid off a touch pass to Fiala, who hammered a one-timer past Utah netminder Connor Ingram on the short side to even the score 2-2.

Forward Alex Laferriere put the Kings ahead for the first time in the game with a breakaway goal, his 15th of the season, for a 3-2 lead. Doughty was involved once again as he lofted a puck out of his own end, high in the air, to Laferriere in transition. The Harvard product deked to his backhand and put his shot past Ingram on the blocker side to put the hosts on top heading into the second intermission.

The Kings added an insurance goal from their fourth line midway through the third period, as forward Trevor Lewis cashed in to make it 4-2. After a Jordan Spence shot from the point was kept out, the rebound was kicked into the slot, where Lewis swiped a backhanded shot through the legs of Ingram and in for his fourth goal of the season, a key insurance goal, putting the hosts ahead by a pair.

With exactly nine minutes on the clock, Utah pulled back to within a goal as Hayton completed his hat trick. Former Kings defenseman Sean Durzi fed forward Michael Carcone in the high slot for a shot on goal, which was kicked out by Kuemper, but Hayton once again got on the end of a rebound, scoring from Kuemper’s left for his third of the night and 15th of the season, bringing the visitors within 4-3.

With 90 seconds remaining, defenseman Mikey Anderson picked the empty net from his own zone, putting the Kings ahead 5-3.

Hear from Doughty, Laferriere and Head Coach Jim Hiller following tonight’s game.

Drew Doughty

Alex Laferriere
On his goal and if he thought Doughty was trying to hit him with a stretch pass or just clear
A little bit of both. I mean, I knew earlier in the shift he tried it and then I knew he was out there for quite a while, so I knew he was just going to try and get it out. I cheated a little bit, but luckily it paid off. We’ll act like it was meant to be.

On his assessment of the game tonight and getting the two points
I thought we just kept it simple was the main part. Obviously, they were going through the same thing, so you kind of just want to try limit mistakes and I think we definitely had a little too many mistakes, so I think just trying to clean that up for the future. Like Jimmy was saying before the game, I think the first four or five games out of the break, everybody’s going to be a little rusty, like the beginning of the season. As long as we can get to that game sooner than other teams, we’ll be in a good spot.

On his hustle play to draw a penalty late in the second period
Honestly, I had no idea how much time was left on the period, so I just tried to get it out of the zone at the start. Then I saw that I could have potentially gotten a breakaway or get a little break there, so I was trying to catch up to the puck and put pressure on it. Then, the goalie shot it out, so we started the period with a power play.

On getting a power-play goal and the effectiveness of the first PP tonight
The first one, we had really good puck movement. I think the second one, we kind of were fumbling it a little bit there, but I think that’ll happen sometimes. It was really nice to get on the board there.

On continuing to build chemistry on a line with Fiala and Byfield
Towards the end and there, when we were thrown together, we didn’t really have much practice time, so you kind of resort to the games to try and build chemistry and get a feel for each other. Now, I think since we had those practices coming back from break, we were able to learn from each other a little bit more in the practices and I think that translated well to the game.

Jim Hiller
On his takeaways from tonight’s game
I didn’t think the execution was great, that was the concern, but we skated really well early, then we kind were hanging on. They didn’t have much through the first two periods, third period they were better than us and we were hanging on a little bit, but listen, we’ll take it. We’re not going to overanalyze it, the first one out of the gate. We won the game, we’ll take it. We weren’t bad, but we always want more.

On Drew Doughty’s performance tonight
It was clearly his best game. I thought the first game that he really looked like himself. We ran him quite a bit before he left, he didn’t look completely comfortable. I thought tonight he really looked comfortable. What I liked when you look at those minutes, those guys were I think between 21 and 22, the four of those guys, so nobody got ran too hard there. They’re all capable of playing more than that, we’ve seen that before, so we’ll see what that minute distribution looks like. I thought Drew was as good as I can even remember, even going back to last year, that would have been one of his probably his top 10 games.

On another strong showing from Kevin Fiala
Yeah, he was dangerous, right? Really dangerous. The one on the back end, he hit the post. We’ve talked about Kevin quite a bit. I think we’re going to see……we’ve seen flashes over two seasons, or two and a half seasons now, of him being a really, really consistent, dangerous threat. I think we’ll see that the rest of the way.

On Alex Laferriere’s play, both the goal and his hustle
That’s really impressive. There’s a lot of things that happened over the course of the game, some nice goals, nice plays, everything, but that’s probably the moment that sticks out for me. That’s a player that you’re like, YEAH, you know what I mean? That’s one of those moments where you’re like, that’s impressive. That time of the clock that that effort, draws a penalty out of the whole thing. I don’t know what to say but I’ll tell you what, coaches notice something like that.

On the distribution of minutes on the blueline tonight among the Top 4 defensemen
I don’t know, I mean, there’ll be times that [Drew] gets that, I think we ran him pretty hard before, but Mikey was out. Mikey and Gavy have been playing 25, 27 on different nights. I think you’ll just see Smitty spread those a little bit more between them but I don’t think you’ll see one guy at 28 and the other guys at 18, 19, 20. I think they’ll probably be a little bit more balanced than we’ve seen in past years.

On Brandt Clarke’s minutes on the other end of the 7D
It’s hard with seven D. It’s hard to balance the minutes with seven D, because unfortunately one guy’s there as a support and depending on the game plays out, there’s just different things that can happen within the game. Sometimes the downside of seven is if you play one guy too much, then you play somebody else [less], so now you’ve got two guys, maybe three, that are out of their rhythm, so it becomes okay, who’s going better? You want to keep one guy in better rhythm than the other guy. Tonight, that’s just the way it shook out.

Notes –
• Defenseman Drew Doughty (1-2=3) scored his first goal of the season in his first game back in a Kings uniform since helping Team Canada capture the inaugural 4 Nations Face-Off Championship in Boston this past Thursday. In the second period, the veteran defenseman notched his second and third assists of the season, his first helpers on home ice this year.
• Tonight’s performance marks the 16th time in his career that Doughty has factored on three goals in a single game.
• Forward Kevin Fiala (1-1=2) fired home his 22nd goal of the campaign to tie the game at two apiece in the second period. Since being acquired on June 29, 2022, Fiala has scored two points or more in 53 games for the Kings, tied for the most such performances on the team in that span with Anze Kopitar.
• Fiala also picked up his 15th helper of the season, his second assist against Utah in as many games played. Fiala now has eight points (6-2=8) in his last five games, dating back to Feb. 1 at Carolina.
• Defenseman Joel Edmundson (0-2=2) picked up his third and fourth points (2-2=4) against the Utah Hockey Club in two games played against the NHL’s newest franchise. Edmundson’s pair of multi-point performances against the Hockey Club clinch his first season with two or more multi-point efforts since 2019-20 with Carolina.
• Forward Alex Laferriere (1-0=1) scored his 15th goal of the season. Laferriere becomes the fourth American-born skater in franchise history to record a 15-goal season before turning 24 years old, joining Dustin Brown (2x), Jimmy Carson (2x) and Steve Jensen.
• Forward Trevor Lewis (1-0=1) scored his fourth goal of the season. The Salt Lake City native becomes the first Utah-born skater in NHL history to score a goal against a Utah-based franchise.
• Defenseman Mikey Anderson (1-0=1) scored his sixth goal of the season, setting a new single-season career high in goals.
• Center Phillip Danault (0-2=2) tallied his 24th and 25th assists of the season, extending his assist streak to a third game (0-5=5) dating back to Feb. 7, 2025. Danault has now recorded at least 25 helpers for the third straight campaign.
• Captain Anze Kopitar (0-1=1) notched his 33rd assist of the season, the 825th assist of his career, tying Alex Delvecchio for the 29th most in League history. Kopitar’s 346 career penalty minutes at the time of his assist beats Delvecchio’s career mark (383 PIMs) for the fewest penalty minutes by any skater with at least 825 assists.
• Kopitar has also now picked up assists in back-to-back games against Utah Hockey Club.
• Defenseman Jordan Spence (0-1=1) assisted on Lewis’ game-winning tally, his 15th assist of the season and first point against the Utah Hockey Club.
• Goaltender Darcy Kuemper stopped 24 of Utah’s 27 shots on goal to secure his third consecutive victory and improve his record to 17-6-6 on the season.

The Kings are scheduled to practice tomorrow at 11 AM at Toyota Sports Performance Center.