LOS ANGELES — Maybe the Kings just aren’t ready for this yet.
After the euphoria of stealing one on the road in Game 1, they’ve fallen to earth with a thud in Games 2 and 3 of their first playoff series in four seasons. A 6-0 debacle in Edmonton on Wednesday night was followed by an equally ragged performance on Friday night at home, an 8-2 rout by the Oilers that again validated many of the forecasts of this best-of-seven first-round series heading into Game 4 on Sunday night.
But there was a twist in Game 3. The focus going in was on Oilers stars Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl and which matchups Kings coach Todd McLellan would utilize against them. With a hat trick by Evander Kane and two goals each from Zach Hyman and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins – one of them scored as he broke his stick – Edmonton made it clear on Friday night: They have plenty of guys who can take advantage of a young team that has turned sloppy and disjointed under the bright lights of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
The Kings’ margin for error was slim anyway. A plus-three goal differential for the season suggested a team that wasn’t going to overpower anyone, and season-long issues with the power play (27th in a 30-team league) and the penalty kill (22nd) have resurfaced in the postseason, dramatically.
Oh, but here’s the good news: The Kings actually scored a power-play goal, Phillip Danault redirecting a shot from a sharp angle by Adrian Kempe late in the second period. That ended an 0-for-10 streak in this series, and it also cut Edmonton’s lead to 5-2 and enabled those Kings fans with long memories to think about a comeback from another five-goal deficit 40 years before.
The bad news: They’re now 1 for 12 for the series. And there would be no reprise of the legendary “Miracle on Manchester” of April 10, 1982, when a scrappy group of underdogs wiped out a 5-0 lead in the third period and beat the soon-to-be-dynastic Oilers of Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, etc., at the Forum. That time, the Kings won the best-of-five first-round series.
There was hope in downtown L.A. on Friday night, and the place was rocking after the goals by Anze Kopitar and Danault, and when the Kings had yet another power play toward the end of the second period. But atmosphere doesn’t make up for all those other imperfections, and the home team let that opportunity slip away and then had their noses rubbed in it with three third-period goals by the Oilers.
It did give us a 27-second post-game summary from Kings coach Todd McLellan.
The question was, “How do you explain the swing between the first game and the last two.”
The answer:
“You know what? We can do this really quick tonight. I can summarize it all up for you and we can all go home. We weren’t any good. We’re really disappointed. We got trapped playing their game. You can ask me about individuals. I’ll give you the same answer for all of them. They weren’t any good. And we have to regroup tomorrow. Grundy (Carl Grundstrom) didn’t play because he had an injury. Anybody have anything else?
“Good night.”
There are times when a player or coach will follow up a miserable effort by saying, “Write what you saw.” The response from here is usually: “Don’t tempt me. You won’t like it.”
But McLellan summed it up masterfully in less than half a minute. They were bad. Really bad. And it wasn’t worth sugarcoating.
Apparently, he made a similar postgame summation after the Kings had been routed 9-3 by Colorado on April 13 in Denver. Following that dismantling, the Kings won five in a row to secure a playoff berth, so maybe there’s a trend.
Or maybe not. None of those five wins came against playoff teams. Now they are facing an opponent with star power, depth, and the motivation of exorcising its own playoff demons after early exits the last two years.
“That’s a big slap in the face tonight,” Danault said. “We’ve got to regroup and look at this as a 2-1 series. … We have to look at it as 2-1. You don’t want to look at all the goals. I know we didn’t play good at all. But yeah, we’ve got to work harder at being better. Everyone’s gotta step up.
“No matter how many young guys we have, how many veterans, it doesn’t matter. We gotta come out together and be better.”
The common wisdom is that this is a Kings team still early in its development curve, and the obvious comparison is to the group – including then-youngsters and now-veterans Kopitar, Jonathan Quick, Dustin Brown and the injured Drew Doughty – that got back to the playoffs for the first time in 2010 but lost to Vancouver in six games in the first round. The next year, they lost to San Jose in six.
And the year after that, they snuck into the playoffs as the No. 8 seed and darned near ran the table. They went 16-4 in the postseason, enabled Brown to accept the Stanley Cup at center ice when it was over and launched a three-year run as an elite, and feared, team.
The point: You have to grow into these moments.
Right now we’re watching that growth, and at times it’s painful to watch. There will be benefits, and the young guys on the roster will be better for it.
At the same time, they still have a chance to write their own history, starting Sunday night. And the best way for them to grow is to raise that bar as high as they can, by learning from losses but not accepting them.
“We’re a good team,” Danault said. “We’re not in the playoffs for no reason. We also have to learn. We have to play better under pressure … the execution’s got to be better. Every area’s got to be better, defensively, neutral zone, O-zone.
“… A lot of work to do, but (we) can do it.”
It helps to not put themselves in a position where they have to expect a miracle.
jalexander@scng.com
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