![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Ryan-Cant-Explain-It.jpg\" "\\"Ryan")
<\/p>\nI don\u2019t know\u2026\u2026can\u2019t explain it. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
One of my favorite underrated scenes in the office. Great acting by B.J. Novak. I thought about it last night, boarding the plane from Montreal to Toronto, coming off yet another road victory for the Los Angeles Kings. <\/p>\n
Last season, the Kings were the NHL\u2019s best team at home, winning 31 times from 41 games played. This season, the Kings have won just once on home ice and yet carry a 7-1-2 record on the road, extended last night with perhaps their most emphatic victory of the season, a 5-1 win over red-hot Montreal. <\/p>\n
The Kings won playing their way last night. Despite a relatively solid opening period, a goal inside the final minute saw the Canadiens take a 1-0 lead into the break. It didn\u2019t get anybody down, though. The Kings came out like gangbusters, scoring three times in the first 5:22 of the second period. Faceoff execution to perfection for the first one, followed by what I thought were two LA Kings style goals from Quinton Byfield and Kevin Fiala. Both delivered with tenacity, both off of winning pucks back in the offensive zone and getting to the high-danger areas to finish. <\/p>\n
It all led to a 2-for-2 start on this trip and the NHL\u2019s second-best road record in the early stages of the regular season. At 7-1-2, no team in the league has collected more points away from home than the Kings have, while their .800 winning percentage trails only the New York Rangers, who have played one fewer game. <\/p>\n
All of which to say, the Kings have had way more success on the road than they have at home. So, much be easy to answer, what\u2019s the secret?<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, it\u2019s weird.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI haven\u2019t seen us doing anything special.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t think of one specific thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ahhhhhh. Okay. <\/p>\n
I\u2019ll probably be repeating what was said quite a bit last season here, but there really isn\u2019t a defined answer to the question. <\/p>\n
The Kings have gotten results on the road and they haven\u2019t at home. Last season, the Kings got results at home and they didn\u2019t on the road. It\u2019s stunningly similar, in opposite directions. The Kings aren\u2019t trying harder on the road than they are at home. They aren\u2019t strategizing any differently. They aren\u2019t approaching games one way versus another in different settings. <\/p>\n
Forward Alex Laferriere said the mentality is the same throughout, pointing simply to a couple of bounces one way in Los Angeles and a couple in the right direction when playing on the road. Fair play. Might honestly be as simple as that. <\/p>\n
But the 2021-22 LA Kings set a franchise record for points on the road. The 2023-24 LA Kings set an NHL record for most consecutive road wins to begin a season. Meanwhile, the 2024-25 LA Kings had the second-worst road record of all 16 playoff teams, alongside what was by far the most successful home campaign in franchise history. All in the span of four seasons.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwo years ago, same thing, we were hot on the road and last year we\u2019re hot at home and now we\u2019re hot on the road, I guess, again,\u201d forward Quinton Byfield said. \u201cCan\u2019t say anything about that, it\u2019s kind of just how it goes sometimes. Obviously, you want to make it both home and away, get some wins at home, but [for now] we\u2019ve got to finish this roadtrip strong.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, the sample size is pretty small here, but we\u2019re already trending in the direction of another very defined split. It\u2019s been the team\u2019s performance on the road that has carried them out of an early-season slump, generated mostly by results at home. <\/p>\n
Again, there isn\u2019t a real rhyme or reason to it. It\u2019s not by choice or the players and coaches trying to do anything different. But it\u2019s there and it\u2019s got to at least be talked about. <\/p>\n
Joel Edmundson had one of the best attempts at trying to get across what he feels might be different.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re together 24\/7 on the road, sometimes you just get into a rhythm and you love winning on the road, you like to silence the crowd early and we play a simple game,\u201d Edmundson said. \u201cMaybe we\u2019re trying to do too much at home and that\u2019s when other teams feed off that. If I had to choose one thing, that would probably be it, but I\u2019ve just liked our game more on the road this year.\u201d<\/p>\n
I think he could be right. Wonder if even last year\u2019s success leads into that a little bit. Coming off of so much success, you\u2019d have to think this would be a team that entered the season feeling really good about themselves at home, as they should. Maybe on the road, where they struggled all of last season, they\u2019ve kept things simple and have gotten results as such. Would at least somewhat stand to reason. <\/p>\n
I thought Darcy Kuemper took a decent crack at it as well. <\/p>\n
\u201cI think we\u2019re playing complete games on the road right now, being tight and playing more the style we want to on a more consistent basis,\u201d he surmised. \u201cNot that we\u2019re not doing it at home, it\u2019s starting to come, but just the 60-minute efforts seem to be there right now on the road. We just want to keep building our game and then it\u2019ll start translating to both home and road games.\u201d<\/p>\n
Style, Consistency and 60-minute efforts. <\/p>\n
Three key buzzwords you typically start to hear when a team is beginning to play well. We have seen more of that LA Kings style on the road. Last night in Montreal perhaps the biggest showing there. Same goes for the consistency and the 60 minutes, with the win over the Canadiens being perhaps as close to a full 60 as we\u2019ve seen from the Kings so far this season. <\/p>\n
I actually think the recent four-game homestand has crept into this trip a bit as well. Jim Hiller said before the Pittsburgh game that the Kings played their best four-game stretch over those four games in Los Angeles. They didn\u2019t really get rewarded for it, posting a 1-2-1 record, but he maintained that the Kings were doing things better and the results would come. Maybe the change of scenery helped in that area. Maybe it\u2019s just a coincidence. But the results have come over the last 72 hours, in wins over Montreal and Pittsburgh. <\/p>\n
Todd McLellan used to say that sometimes, when you\u2019re slumping, you\u2019d see positive signs before you saw results. Same went the other way, that the \u201csickness\u201d as he phrased it would show up in your game before you started losing. Maybe there\u2019s a little bit of that here. <\/p>\n
Hiller felt that in that stretch, the Kings played as they played last season. That he saw positives despite the defeats. Maybe now is the reward for what was done at Crypto.com Arena, that went punished, rather than rewarded. <\/p>\n
\u201cProbably the best stretch as far as looking like that\u2019s how we want to play, having the other team feel like the Kings are coming, they\u2019re forechecking, they\u2019re forechecking us, they\u2019re heavy in the o-zone, not giving us much,\u201d he said. \u201cWe just hadn\u2019t gotten the results.\u201d<\/p>\n
Well, now they are.<\/p>\n
And they\u2019ve got to keep that going. <\/p>\n
Toronto, Ottawa and Washington to close out the trip. Three teams that made the playoffs last season, like the Kings. Three teams that hadn\u2019t started their 2025-26 seasons the way they wanted to, like the Kings, though all four teams seem to be finding their way, Ottawa in particular. The Kings are 2-0-0 on their current trip and winning even one of those three games guarantees them a winning trip. <\/p>\n
As they\u2019re starting to find their groove, though, they should be in search of more than that. They\u2019ve dug themselves, again, out of the hole they put themselves in. Road success has been the primary driver as to why. No better time than what\u2019s ahead to keep that success rolling. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I don\u2019t know\u2026\u2026can\u2019t explain it. One of my favorite underrated scenes in the office. Great acting by B.J.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":288195,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-288194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288194\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/288195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}