The Kings season ended again Wednesday with a whimper not a bang.
It ended again in the first round of the NHL playoffs and again in a loss to the Edmonton Oilers, who have become for the Kings what kryptonite was for Superman.
The final score of the final game was 4-3, but that was just a bookkeeping detail because the series was over long before the final horn sounded. The Oilers outscored the Kings 22-13 in the five games, with nine of those goals coming in 19 chances on the power play. They didn’t concede a goal on the Kings’ 12 power-play opportunities.
Four Oilers — Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Evan Bouchard and Zach Hyman — finished the series with at least eight points, twice as many as the Kings’ co-leaders, Quinton Byfield and Adrian Kempe. As beatdowns go, this one was about as one-sided as the Kings-Oilers playoff history has been in general.
Read more: For third year in a row, Kings’ season ended by Edmonton
Yet for Kings defenseman Drew Doughty, it really didn’t matter what color the other uniform was. What matters is the Kings are out of the playoffs after one round.
Again.
“The whole point, I think, is that we lost three years in a row in the first round,” he said. “Yeah, it was against Edmonton. But no matter who we lost to, it would have been the same amount of disappointment, same amount of wanting to win the series.”
And a third straight loss in the first round of the playoffs will undoubtedly lead to some offseason soul-searching for the Kings. Did interim coach Jim Hiller show enough in getting the team to the playoffs for general manager Rob Blake to remove the interim tag and give Hiller the permanent job? Will that even be Blake’s decision to make?
In Blake’s seven seasons in charge the Kings have made the playoffs four times, but never advanced beyond the opening round. When Blake fired coach Todd McLellan in February, he said a new voice was needed in the dressing room. Could the same now be true in the front office?
Plus the Kings have seven players who became unrestricted free agents after Wednesday’s loss, among them defenseman Matt Roy, forward Trevor Lewis and goaltenders Cam Talbot and David Rittich. They will all need to be re-signed or replaced.
And finally the team will have to decide what to do with…