Kings General Manager Ken Holland has routinely referenced the 20-game mark as the first real judgement opportunity for a hockey team.
20 games is typically approaching American Thanksgiving, which is the time when – historically speaking – 12 of the 16 teams occupying playoff spots will finish the season in those spots. It’s not a science and it’s not 12 every season. Just historical trends. The point, though, is that you really begin to learn what your team is about with approximately 20 games of sample size to reference.
So, bigger picture, where does Holland believe this team is at?
“I think we’re playing better, there’s lots of good things. We’re 9-2-2 in our last 13, we’re the second best road record in the league. We’ve got ourselves up to [seventh] best in goals against. I think we were planning that special teams would be a little bit better. I think we’re [29th and 21st]. When we talked about bringing in some of the people and some of the things, I think the penalty killing has been much better lately. We kind of got off to a slow start, it takes a while. We’re bottom third in the league in goals, around 20th, we’d like to score a little more and part of that would be power play. I think part of that would be maybe going to the net a a little bit harder. When I look at our division, I was looking [on Thursday], I think second to seventh was three points, 20 to 17, so everything’s jammed together. It’s still pretty early, but I think we’re relatively happy where we’re at. We’ve lost a couple that we’d like to think we would have won, but we pulled one out, pulled a point out in the last two minutes against Detroit, the goalie stole us a game in San Jose, so it all evens out over 18 games again. There’s probably three or four points we’d like to think we lost, but there’s probably three or four points that we that we won.”
Lot to unpack there, but the general sentiment seems to be that the Kings are right where they should be, based on their performance.
Holland referenced the point stolen against Detroit and you could probably throw in the point in Minnesota as well. The win over San Jose was a clear heist by goaltender Darcy Kuemper. On the other side of it, the Kings should’ve gotten two points, not one, in Nashville and should’ve beaten Pittsburgh at home back in October. So there’s say 3-5 points in both directions that were maybe against the grain, but it’s evened out, relatively speaking.
Holland pointed to the team’s strong performance on the road and the record as of late as positives and he’s correct there. The team’s defensive identity is starting to return after a few bigger numbers early in the season and he’s correct on the penalty kill, as noted here over the last couple of days. In a 10-game stretch heading into the Ottawa game, the Kings ranked third in the NHL at just shy of 90 percent, which is excellent. Add in two successful kills versus the Senators and it’s 27-of-30 over the past 11.
The negatives are what I think we’ve all seen. The team has not scored goals at the same clip they did after the trade deadline last season, despite relatively consistent personnel and a lot of that comes down to a power play that hasn’t maintained early-season productivity, certainly coming in behind where they were at last year. At 2.84 goals-per-game, the Kings rank just 21st in the NHL. It’s behind last season’s pace as a whole (3.04, but very similar to where they were heading into the 2025 Trade Deadline (2.80). It’s been a little bit better of late, but there’s still work to be done offensively and Holland recognized that.
In terms of individuals, he agreed that a 20-game sample size is a fair indicator to judge where players are at.
“I think there’s enough games there, it’s quarter of the season, it’s a relatively good amount of games.”
The conversation was more team-centric than focused on individuals, but if we accept that 20 games is an acceptable sample size, then players like Adrian Kempe, Kevin Fiala and Quinton Byfield are producing at a very acceptable clip in that span. You look at the Danault line, offensively speaking, as being the other way, probably along with Andrei Kuzmenko. Holland didn’t go into those players, but by the statsheet, that’s where things have gone thus far.
Another thing he touched on was the parity in the league, which perhaps complicates a 20-game evaluation and likely a potential trade market, should the Kings look at any sort of a transaction.
The Kings have played 13 of their first 19 games this season against teams that qualified for the 2025 Stanley Cup Playoffs. They’ve played 12 of 19 games against teams currently in a playoff spot and the Venn Diagram there makes it 17 of 19 against teams with at least one of those two qualifiers.
“I think the parity in the National Hockey League, I think it’s as close as it’s ever been,” he said. “There might have been more teams in the past that were rebuilding and I don’t know that there’s many rebuilding teams anymore. I think everybody’s trying to win, everyone’s trying to be a playoff team. I think it’s really, really close.”
All in all, Holland has been happy, but not satisfied with the team’s play, is how I think I would summarize it.
He’s seeing the same things that we all are. There have been really good things, really good stretches, really good periods or even games, but an overall lack of consistency.
“I like the way we played against Winnipeg. I like the way we played against Montreal. Pittsburgh, I can’t say, I was traveling, but they tell me we played a good third period. So, I would say this to you, early in the year, we had our moments. We played 40 good minutes, 45 good minutes, not 60. We’re playing more to 60 minutes now. Penalty killing has gotten better, power play produced early, but I look and I think we’re 29th in the power play, under 16 percent now. If you can kill penalties and you keep the puck out of your net, the power play is not as big a factor but early on, when we were giving up goals, we were like 23rd, 24th, 25th five games in. You’ve either got to score goals or you’ve got to prevent them. We’ve got back to playing LA Kings hockey 1763382252.”
LA Kings hockey has looked like winning hockey as of late and as shown above, there are areas for improvement that can only help going forward.
3 Individual Notes –
– Holland said that he met face-to-face with Adrian Kempe’s agent, J.P. Berry on this trip. He believes that conversation made progress towards an extension.
“The hope, the plan is to find a solution, to get him signed. I believe he wants to be here. We want to get him signed. Trying to find that sweet spot that they feel good and we feel good.”
Holland agreed when I asked if he felt the market had shifted upwards at all as other players around the league had signed. He said that a couple of other contracts provided a couple of “comps” to work off of, which he actually believes has helped negotiations a bit, even if it probably costs the Kings some money when all is said and done.
We’ll see where it lands, but one thing that has remained consistent is that both sides seem to want to reach a resolution.
– When asked about offseason signings, he pointed to the Dumoulin/Ceci pairing being -5 in their first three games, but seeing that figure for both players essentially go unchanged since that point.
He credited Jim Hiller with quickly pivoting from that pair but also for bringing them back together, which meant that Mikey Anderson and Drew Doughty went back together.
“I think that we’ve been able to roll three pairs. When you look at the minutes played most nights, they’re all playing about the same, it’s Doughty and those other four get the penalty killing, Doughty and Clarke get the power play. I think we’ve been able to roll three pairs more.”
If Doughty misses any time, it’ll be interesting to see how those two defensemen in particular are utilized and how much reliance goes into their game. Doughty provides a safety net in a number of ways. Take that away and there is more sink or swim involved.
– On Clarke, Holland pointed out he didn’t watch the Kings for 82 games last season, so he didn’t want to make a comparable to last year, but he said that feedback from the coaching staff is that Clarke in the preseason was a step ahead of where he was last year and that from that base, Holland believes that Clarke 20 games in is even a step ahead of that.
“I didn’t see him last year, so I’m going to tell you that the coaches tell me that they think he’s made a step from last year and I think he’s made a step from what I saw early in the year, preseason to now. Seems like he’s found good chemistry with Edmundson. I think with all young defensemen, it just learning to defend and he’s playing hard. I think he’s playing good and he’s on a good path.”
Nice to hear that. There have been external and unsubstantiated rumors about trades involving Clarke, but feels like Holland is pretty happy with the game he’s playing and what he’s delivering.
So that’s 20(ish) games with Ken Holland.
Will take a deeper look this week into a true quarter-season evaluation, including what’s gone well and what hasn’t with more detail and depth provided.
For today, it’s an off day in DC. Kings need a good rest day today and then they’ll be right back at it on Monday against the Capitals. Haven’t heard anything just yet regarding defenseman Drew Doughty. More coverage to follow!