More alarming than the Kings squandering another late lead Thursday, more concerning than a losing streak that hit 0-4-3 when Florida’s Sam Reinhart scored on a slick backhander with 0.7 seconds left in overtime at Sunrise, Fla., was Kings captain Anze Kopitar’s postgame assessment of the team’s psyche.
“Right now, it feels like we’ve got to play a perfect game,” he told Dennis Bernstein of TheFourthPeriod.com. “Good or pretty good is not good enough right now, so it’ll take a team effort to get out of it.”
There is no such thing as a perfect game in hockey. The ice is slippery, eh? And for the Kings to think they must play flawlessly to win sets them up for more failure, almost excusing a letdown at the next bad penalty, errant pass, or unlucky bounce. Good teams separate themselves from the pack by winning even if they don’t play well. The Kings (20-10-8) have a good amount of talent, but they’re not a good team right now.
Read more: Kings fall to Panthers in final second of overtime for seventh consecutive loss
They’re halfway through a six-game trip that continues Saturday in Detroit against the Red Wings, who rallied to beat them in a shootout last Thursday in Los Angeles. While the Kings have been getting some loser points through the NHL’s reward for overtime or shootout losses, the Edmonton Oilers have been earning two points on an impressively regular basis: They’ve moved three points behind the Kings for third in the Pacific Division on the strength of a nine-game winning streak.
Second-place Vegas has been struggling and the Kings hold four games in hand on them, but those games will mean nothing if the Kings don’t win them. And, to do that, they apparently must play perfectly.
Team president Luc Robitaille declined to comment on the team’s state. But it’s clear that a promising start to their season has dissolved into a muddled middle. On Dec. 7, after a shutout win at Montreal, the Kings were 16-4-3. Since then, they’re 4-6-5.
“We’re at that point where the line [between] winning and losing is so fine,” coach Todd McLellan told reporters Thursday in Florida. “At the beginning of the year it came easily, now it’s really tough. But everybody, cliches that coaches use and reporters and players, that…