Where do the Kings go from here after an inexcusable playoff exit?

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EDMONTON – The scene has become all too familiar.

Once Connor Brown deposited the puck into the empty Los Angeles net and rejoiced, the Kings milled about the ice in a dazed and confused state. Drew Doughty bent over. Kevin Fiala took a knee. Anze Kopitar and Andrei Kuzmenko slowly skated in circles. Doughty reached back and tapped a defeated Darcy Kuemper on his goalie pad.

Kopitar then led the annual sorrowful handshake line with the Edmonton Oilers. Mikey Anderson was right behind, with Doughty and the rest of the Kings in tow. Bringing up the rear were Jim Hiller and his coaching staff. Brave faces put on by all to hide the disappointment. And then Kopitar stayed at the gate door leading to the locker room, greeting all his teammates with stick taps and hugs.

The Kings move into yet another offseason with difficult questions that only get harder with each spring. This latest first-round exit to the Oilers in six games ventures into the inexplicable. Four straight now borders on cruel comedy. Some years, the Oilers were clearly the better team. Probably were in the previous three, especially with last year’s five-game dusting.

But this one is different. The Kings came in with their best team out of the four against the Oilers and had by far their best shot against a group weakened by a late-season string of injuries. The advantage of home ice they grabbed with a 17-5-0 finish to the regular season. Edges nearly everywhere outside of not having a supernova like Connor McDavid or Leon Draisaitl on their team instead. And, through blown leads and regretfully disastrous coaching decisions, they couldn’t even make it to the first Game 7 in L.A. since 2013.

“Yeah, this one’s tough to swallow obviously,” Kopitar said. “Having the season that we have. The group of guys in this locker room and to come up short again, it’s frustrating. This one hurts a little more.”

That will be a theme to run through the Kings for the next days and months. Maybe until the time comes when they’re finally on the winning side of a handshake line. Who knows when that will be, though?

“This series, besides the last home game we had, I felt like we were the better team,” said Adrian Kempe, who couldn’t keep up his torrid playoff numbers against the Oilers. “Couldn’t close out the games out that we should have. So that came back and bit us.”

What do you do with these Kings now? Where do you go from here?

Is the answer a new management structure? They’ve yet to win a playoff round in Rob Blake’s eight seasons as general manager, with the last four supposedly being the build-up to Stanley Cup contention. Team president Luc Robitaille is overseeing this failure to get the postseason job done. Blake’s contract is up, and it’d be more surprising to see him extended than there being a graceful separation from his GM duties being orchestrated. But how much of this also falls on Robitaille?

What about Hiller? There’s no doubt that the Kings responded to him, they wouldn’t have tied franchise bests with 48 wins and 105 points. However, he did himself no favors with questionable decisions in this series that dramatically backfired. The awful goalie interference challenge in Game 3 is one thing but the stubbornness to not use the depth that was a theoretical advantage was worse. Leaning on nine forwards and four defensemen to near exclusivity took its toll on the overtime of Game 4 and the brutally bad Game 5. The irony in Game 6 was that the Oilers’ depth players made the difference.

With a robust coaching market and several openings in the NHL, is this where the Kings make another change just 16 months after giving Todd McLellan his walking papers? It couldn’t have looked good for Hiller when Brandt Clarke and Jordan Spence both scored in a wide-open Game 6 on Thursday. Clarke’s 14:48 of ice time was his most the six games. Spence, who was scratched in Game 4, finally broke the 10-minute barrier.

Hiller’s response to the suggestion that he should have used his depth players more also won’t sit well with Kings faithful. Asked directly if he’ll question his deployment of players in the series, he said, “No.”

Final from Edmonton. #GoKingsGo pic.twitter.com/qKzXSioFGF

— LA Kings (@LAKings) May 2, 2025

Lineup alterations paid off throughout the regular season, but the result remains the same. More roster tinkering around their core doesn’t feel like the answer. Running it back doesn’t feel like it either. Blowing up the roster might be the wish for some but that doesn’t seem realistic given they still employ franchise legends Kopitar and Doughty along with several major contractual commitments to key players. (That could also include re-signing shutdown defenseman Vladislav Gavrikov).

Is wishing for a playoff opponent other than the Oilers the answer? Worth a try. No matter what they try or do, it hasn’t been good enough. And that’s the Kings in a nutshell – good but not good enough. They take great pride in their defense and goaltending and the statistics prove that out over 82 games. It isn’t good enough to take down McDrai and Co.

Does that mean a fundamental change in the way they play? Game 6 looked very anti-Kings in terms of style as they engaged in a track meet with the Oilers, trading chances throughout the 60 minutes. The 6-4 loss was entertaining but futile, with two early first-period leads gone in the blink of an eye. But they never sat back in prevent defense so there’s that.

There is no easy answer to move the Kings forward but it’s hard to take a step backward when you have a cast of veterans and Kopitar and Doughty, who were clear in their exit meeting last spring that they had no interest in enduring another rebuilding phase or retool, take your pick on the wording.

“There’s not very many games throughout the season that we mailed it in,” Kopitar said. “And even if we had an off night, I thought we always came back strong playing the team game. Tonight was no different. The effort was there. The fight was there but we came up short.”

This series will forever be known as the one the Kings gave away. Two home wins they claimed in their desperation to change the narrative wasted with the fateful series flip in Edmonton, eternally marked by The Challenge in Game 3 and the failed clear by Quinton Byfield in Game 4 when they were less than a minute away from a 3-1 lead.

The Kings could easily be playing Vegas in their first second-round series since 2014. Missed opportunity will be the title of this loss. “Hundred percent,” Hiller said.

“It’s very clear. It’s a missed opportunity for us,” he continued. “Especially we had great buy-in from our players. We believe we could have won the series. We believed we should have won the series. We didn’t. That’s the bottom line.”

Afterward, Hiller wouldn’t say a mental block exists among the Kings when it comes to the Oilers and this time of the year. “Not going to go there,” he said flatly. “Nope. No, we had our chances. We had our chances to get it done. Didn’t get it done.”

The unmistakable calamity of costly errors both physical and philosophical have left the Kings with an inexcusable end to their season. Game 3. Game 4. As Kopitar said, “We didn’t close out.”

“It’s a completely different series if we go home up 3-1 versus 2-2,” the Kings’ captain added. “But coulda, woulda, shoulda.”

(Photo of Kings team-mates consoling goaltender Darcy Kuemper: Perry Nelson-Imagn Images)

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