New season, same doubts for Kings after opening night rout

DENVER — Talking about the postseason on opening night might sound premature, but what else are the Kings supposed to be measured against at this point?

It has been 12 years since they last won a playoff series. The franchise that won two Stanley Cups and reached three consecutive conference finals from 2012 through 2014 has spent more than a decade trying to give its fans another reason to believe their season can extend beyond the first round.

So when the Kings opened their season against the Colorado Avalanche on Wednesday night, it was impossible to separate the beginning of this season from the embarrassing end of the last one. Colorado swept the Kings out of the playoffs, finishing the job with 4-2 and 5-1 victories in front of their home crowd at Crypto.com Arena.

This was an opportunity to show that something had changed. Instead, an 8-4 loss at Ball Arena offered another painful reminder of how much ground the Kings still have to make up.

They had a new head coach in Peter Laviolette, a new captain in Drew Doughty and additions that included Erik Haula, Erik Gustafsson and Mats Zuccarello. They had an entire summer to think about what happened against Colorado and prepare for their next chance against the team that ended their season. None of that prevented the Avalanche from making the Kings look overmatched again.

One game cannot tell us whether the gap between these teams has actually grown. It can tell us that the Kings did very little Wednesday to suggest it has narrowed, and that is an uncomfortable place to begin a season built around the hope that this spring will finally be different.

The most troubling part was that the Kings did enough offensively to give themselves a chance. Brian Dumoulin and Artemi Panarin scored, while Joel Armia and Trevor Moore each added a shorthanded goal. It was the first season opener in franchise history in which the Kings scored twice while killing penalties. They finished with a 30-29 edge in shots and won nearly 64% of the faceoffs.

And they still lost by four goals. Whatever encouragement could be found in those numbers disappeared when Colorado went 4 for 5 on the power play and the Kings went 0 for 4.

“Against that team, when you take that many penalties and make mistakes like that, they can really make you pay, and they sure did today,” Haula said. “Offensively, on the road, when you score four goals, you like your chances most nights.”

The Kings cannot expect to beat a team like Colorado by giving it repeated opportunities to exploit their mistakes. They cannot leave the middle of the ice open, lose track of their defensive responsibilities and then point to their own scoring chances as evidence that things are coming together. Against an opponent that has already exposed them in a playoff series, those breakdowns carry a familiar consequence.

“There’s a clear line of when we’re attacking and when we need to defend and we didn’t recognize that line very well at times,” Laviolette said.

That is where the work begins for Laviolette, whose arrival represents the Kings’ strongest argument that this season can end differently. He has taken three franchises to the Stanley Cup Final and won a championship with the Carolina Hurricanes. He understands that the team a coach has at the beginning of a season does not have to be the team he takes into the playoffs.

When I asked him about building those teams, he pointed to the work that happens away from the predictions and expectations surrounding opening night.

“I think those things are built in the room,” Laviolette told The Sporting Tribune. “None of those teams were expected to be the team.”

He emphasized the process of developing a group that becomes difficult to play against over the course of a season. That is a reasonable approach for a coach beginning his first year with a team, and he deserves time to establish it. The problem is that Kings fans have been waiting for a postseason breakthrough since 2014. A new coach gets a fresh start; the people buying tickets still remember how the previous seasons ended.

They are entitled to ask whether this roster has changed enough to produce a different result. Haula, Gustafsson and Zuccarello can help, but Wednesday offered no evidence that those additions have fundamentally changed the Kings’ ability to compete with Colorado. Laviolette can improve their structure and demand better execution. Whether those improvements will be enough to win four games against a playoff opponent remains the question hanging over this team.

To Haula’s credit, he was not interested in using the adjustment to a new coach and new systems to explain away the performance.

“No, we’re not going to use that as an excuse,” he said. “I think we have a pretty good idea how we’re supposed to play. When you give up eight, it’s just not good enough. We’ll go back, correct some things, and be better next game.”

That is the response the Kings needed to give. The next step is making it mean something on the ice. Staying out of the penalty box, protecting the middle and recognizing when to stop pressing offensively are reasonable expectations for this group, even at the beginning of a season.

“I felt like a lot of the things that we gave them tonight were our responsibility,” Laviolette said. “There are things that can be in our control.”

There is time to correct those things. There is also a difference between correcting an ugly opening-night performance and building a team capable of advancing in the postseason. The Kings have to accomplish the first before anyone should feel comfortable predicting the second.

Doughty began his 19th season with the franchise Wednesday, passing Dustin Brown for the second most in Kings history behind Anze Kopitar. He knows what winning a championship in Los Angeles looks like, and he has now spent most of his career waiting to win another playoff series.

No one should expect Laviolette to erase that history in one night. But after another lopsided loss to the team that swept them last spring, the Kings are still asking their fans to believe in improvement they have yet to see. A new season has begun, and the burden of proof remains exactly where it was when the last one ended.