NHL: Los Angeles Kings – 2025/2026 review
Ninety points, a fifth straight playoff berth, and then four straight losses to Colorado in round one. That was Anze Kopitar’s last season. His retirement closes out an era in Los Angeles, and the franchise now has to work out who it is without the captain it built everything around.
Key numbers
2025-2026 record: 35-27-20 (225 goals for, 247 against)
2025-2026 NHL standing: 4th in the Pacific Division
2025-2026 top scorer: Adrian Kempe (36)
2025-2026 top playmaker: Adrian Kempe (37)
2025-2026 points leader: Adrian Kempe (73)
Average age of roster (2026-2027): 31.5 years
Available cap space (2026-2027): $1.78M
Recent moves (off-season)
Arrivals:
- Erik Haula (F)
- Corey Perry (F)
- Mats Zuccarello (F)
Departures:
- Andrei Kuzmenko (F)
- Jeff Malott (F)
- Mathieu Joseph (F)
The oldest roster in the league, on purpose
Los Angeles Kings – Future contracts and draft picks
Los Angeles have turned the page on Kopitar. They have not turned it toward the kids. The front office went the other way entirely, adding Mats Zuccarello (39) and Erik Haula (35) and bringing Corey Perry (41) back, which leaves the Kings with the oldest roster in the NHL.
Peter Laviolette, hired in June, wants more attack than his predecessor did. He inherits a group built around Artemi Panarin and Adrian Kempe up front. Drew Doughty is another matter. He has said he wants to finish his career in Los Angeles and no extension has come, and the front office’s quiet leaves plenty of room to wonder what happens if the season goes sideways.
Quinton Byfield may get the No. 1 centre job by default, which is a lot to hand a player still figuring things out. The draft cupboard is fine, with a first-rounder in every year through 2029. The summer’s question never got answered though: can a pile of veterans in their thirties push a team past a first round it has not cleared in over a decade, or is this just the rebuild being kicked down the road?
A new coach with the opposite instincts
Kopitar’s Kings had a recognisable shape. Disciplined in their own end, patient, occasionally stubborn about it, much like the captain. That shape walks out the door with him. Laviolette arrives wanting speed, transition and pressure, and a group that spent years inside a different system will need time to live in this one.
Kevin Fiala and Trevor Moore stand to gain most. Both are quick wingers who often looked boxed in by the caution of recent seasons. Darcy Kuemper faces the opposite trade: a defence in front of him that will gamble more than it used to.
Zuccarello and Haula have played this kind of hockey elsewhere and know the demands. Whether that loosens an attack teams have found easy to read for years is the whole bet, and there is not much runway left for this roster if it does not.
Player to watch: Artemi Panarin (F)
Panarin landed in February and scored at better than a point per game straight away. One of those assists made Kopitar the franchise’s all-time points leader.
Now he gets a full season in Los Angeles for the first time, and a reunion with Laviolette, the coach he played his best New York hockey under in 2023-24.
Ninety points is roughly where the projections sit, which would make him the offence by a distance. Whether that fixes an attack this predictable is another matter. One elite forward can hide a thin depth chart for a while. Not forever.
2026-2027 target
Projected Los Angeles Kings lines 2026-2027
Win a playoff series. That has been the target for years now, and the last one came in 2014. Holland called last season a failure himself, with the team scraping in after a step backwards.
His plan rests on a full year of Panarin, a bigger workload for Byfield down the middle and Laviolette’s more aggressive system. The Athletic already files the Kings in the worst spot on the map: too good to tear down, not good enough to worry anyone.
A round won would say the post-Kopitar handover is working. A first missed playoffs in six years would start a conversation nobody in the building wants to have.
My call
The Sharks, the Ducks and the Kings look like a three-way scrap for third, and I have Los Angeles finishing last of the three. Not out of the picture, but last. The reason is not complicated: this roster is old. There is talent on it. I am not convinced the pieces go together. Five straight first-round exits is a lot of patience already spent, and if February goes badly this team could be sold for parts before the deadline. Defining year, first one without the player who defined the last twenty.
Photo credit: wallpapersafari.com | sethmiller
Leave a Reply