That leaves at least one assistant coaching vacancy for a staff that currently has an interim head coach, Jim Hiller, and an assistant whom the Kings brought into the fold in February, D.J. Smith, whose status might also be uncertain.

“We appreciate all that Trent has contributed over the past five seasons and thank him for his dedication to the organization,” Kings general manager Rob Blake said.

Yawney joined the Kings in 2019, arriving with Todd McLellan. He had worked under McLellan previously in San Jose and Edmonton, in addition to his time as an assistant with the Ducks. Yawney may rejoin McLellan, whom the Kings sacked in February. McLellan has drawn interest from multiple teams with coaching vacancies.

At exit meetings, Blake extolled the Kings’ defensive excellence and throughout the season the Kings’ leap from 24th to second in the NHL was a significant boost to a team that was offensively challenged from December onward.

Yawney ran the Kings’ penalty kill and back end, areas that could transfer over to Smith if he were to be retained.

Like McLellan, Yawney is a native of Saskatchewan, and the two played together in the province for the Saksatoon Blades. While McLellan’s NHL career lasted just five games, Yawney played nearly 600 regular-season contests and 60 more playoff matches.

“Trent has an incredible amount of experience coaching all different types of defensemen,” McLellan told reporters when the Kings hired Yawney. “He has played with and coached several Norris Trophy winners and Hall of Famers, including Chris Chelios, Doug Wilson, Phil Housley, Rob Blake and Duncan Keith. On the whole, he has played and coached the game at a high level, and he is a tremendous teacher who relates very well to many different types of people.”

Rittich, also known as “Big Save Dave,” burst onto the netminding scene with the Calgary Flames at the tail end of the last decade, but found himself declining from journeyman status to that of a marginal NHL goalie before signing a one-year pact with the Kings last season that saw him start the campaign in the minors.

But like Pheonix Copley the season prior, Rittich resuscitated his pro career, first in the American Hockey League and then at the top level with the Kings. Copley began the year as the backup to Cam Talbot, but he underperformed and then sustained a serious knee injury, swinging the gate open for Rittich.

Rittich, 31, stabilized the Kings during a period when Talbot and the team struggled mightily, ultimately appearing in 24 regular-season games. Among NHL goalies with at least that many appearances, Rittich finished second in goals-against average (2.15) and tied for second in save percentage (.921).

Rittich was not made available Wednesday, nor during the exit interview period, nor after Games 4 and 5 of the Kings’ first-round loss to the Edmonton Oilers, which he started after Talbot got the nods in Games 1, 2 and 3. Rittich and then was saddled with .

Rittich and Talbot were bargain-bin purchases, making less than $2 million in base salary combined last season. Talbot roughly doubled his salary in performance bonuses, however. Talbot also expressed interest in returning next year. While the Kings could explore free-agent or trade options, they are now halfway to running it back between the pipes. That remained a salient possibility given their limited flexibility, as well as Talbot’s desire to return.

Having played for six teams in the past six seasons, Talbot said on breakup day that he valued stability as well as the opportunity to pursue a Stanley Cup, which the 36-year-old has never won. Talbot said he would prefer to return to the Kings, who helped him re-establish his value after a rocky campaign with the Ottawa Senators.

“I proved that I still have a lot left in the tank, which I wasn’t always so sure about after [the 2022-23 season],” Talbot said. “To come in here and play the way I did and be a part of this group was a ton of fun. I had a great time with these guys and it ended way too early, but I would still love to be back, for sure.”

Defenseman Matt Roy and winger Viktor Arvidsson will be eligible to become unrestricted free agents on July 1 if agreements aren’t reached before then.

Roy proved his worth through steadiness and consistency, missing just one game in the past two seasons, for the birth of his child. Arvidsson might have better established his value through absences: in the 2022 playoffs against Edmonton when the Kings lost in seven games and across most of last season, when the Kings sorely missed his skill and aggression.

Arvidsson’s two back surgeries in the span of a year and a half will certainly be at the forefront of decisions about his future. Both Arvidsson (31) and Roy (29) are at ages when their prospects of a subsequent long, lucrative contract after this one would be in question.

“I love this team; I love the guys on the team. L.A. is a great city, a great place to stay, and I’d be more than happy to stay,” Roy said. “Obviously, it’s a business for the team and myself, so we’re kind of going into the summer open-minded.”

“[This contract] is very important. Age-wise, I’m at that point in my career where some term and stability would be great for my family. That’s a key factor for me,” he added.

In 2023-24, Roy finished second on the team in plus-minus rating (plus-21), one tick behind Mikey Anderson, despite scoring a modest 25 points and mostly due to his sound decision-making. Arvidsson, in addition to scoring 15 points in 18 games, helped earn the Kings a 13-5-0 record in games he played. That represented a .722 winning percentage, a figure that plummeted to .484 without him.

Entering last season, the plan was to check in with both players around Christmas and, absent an extension, again at the trade deadline. Roy was earning $3.150 million against the salary cap, with Arvidsson consuming $4.250 million of cap space, figures that were at least slightly under market value for their respective contributions.

Yet Arvidsson’s injuries – he missed 64 games between back surgery and an unrelated lower-body injury – overshadowed any potential negotiations, he said. Meanwhile, the Kings, who squeezed their cap tightly in a dizzying series of moves and at relative premiums, encountered their own unanticipated setbacks as they descended into an abyss in January, leading to .

“We were just looking to check in around Christmas or New Year’s, which we did,” Roy said. “Unfortunately, we had a tough January and then everything went down with Todd and all that stuff. That put a hold on everything. We all decided to wait until the summer.”

Arvidsson said he hadn’t fully assessed his goals as far as value and term, and that those conversations would take place in the weeks to come. Roy is represented by Richard Evans and Arvidsson by Kurt Overhardt.

“Me and my family, we’re open-minded, we’re going to talk through things over the summer,” Arvidsson said. “We’ll see what the Kings want to do and evaluate how that situation sounds.”

Both players brought distinctive intangibles to the team, with Roy’s judicious, do-what-the-situation-calls-for acumen stabilizing the back end while Arvidsson’s shot mentality, play-making and confrontational nature were all lacking through much of the rest of the forward group.

While many teams are short on right-handed-shooting defensemen, the Kings have been notoriously overstocked at that spot. Roy joined Drew Doughty and Jordan Spence on the main roster last year, which at times also featured top prospect Brandt Clarke, all of whom shot right-handed. Sean Walker, Helge Grans, Brock Faber and Sean Durzi were all right-shooting blue-liners whom the Kings discarded via trade in the past two summers. In Clarke, they have a capable replacement for Roy, potentially, or for Spence if they were to opt to trade him in an effort to re-sign Roy.

Arvidsson, on the other hand, was missed on the power play – the Kings had no one-timer threat from the left faceoff circle without him, among other lacking components – and five-on-five, where linemate Phillip Danault has always valued having a right shot on his flank. Rookie Alex Laferriere and penalty kill specialist Trevor Lewis were the Kings’ only right shots up front for much of last season.

Prior to joining the Kings via trade in the 2021 offseason, Arvidsson had played his entire career for the Nashville Predators, including a run to the 2017 Stanley Cup Final. Nashville moved his contract despite its favorable terms largely because of mounting injuries. While he did not put those woes behind him in the way that Justin Williams did as a King, Arvidsson demonstrated value even beyond his formidable production when healthy.

Roy’s situation also presents a question about asset management, as if the Kings were to lose him in free agency, they would have missed a significant opportunity to acquire futures for him at the trade deadline. If that were the case, he’d be a costly own-rental – right-shooting defensemen like Walker and Chris Tanev commanded solid return packages at the deadline – and one that netted them just one evanescent playoff round.

General Manager Rob Blake provided no concrete details regarding either negotiation, but did say that pending restricted free agent Quinton Byfield’s extension was a significant emphasis for the Kings.

Typically, they have prioritized unrestricted free agents like Arvidsson and Roy, particularly over non-arbitration-eligible RFAs. But with this summer’s salary cap bump freeing up possibilities for many teams – not the Kings, who effectively pre-spent their bump in dead cap and will be challenged to bring back Byfield and fill their net along with other roster spots – Byfield could be a viable target for offer sheets.

“Quinton [would be] a priority, regardless of the timing and situation,” Blake said.

Those comments were considered encouraging signs for the Kings – limiting, stifling and consternating the opposition would be the ideal progression of a neutral-zone trap that attempts to dictate exactly what the other team does with the puck – but lately, it’s been the Kings’ own players expressing frustration with the system.

At exit interviews last week, even some players’ defenses of the system called it “boring,” according to decorated 1-3-1 veteran Anže Kopitar, and acknowledged that the Kings “got into it a little too much,” per leading goal-scorer Trevor Moore.

This year’s leading point-producer and the Kings’ top sniper across the past three seasons, Adrian Kempe, said a 1-2-2 setup, which the Kings used on a limited basis, often when trailing, was “more fun” and would give the Kings’ scorers more opportunities to not only create turnovers but convert them into scoring chances.

Kevin Fiala, who joined Kempe and Kopitar among the Kings with more than 70 points this season, echoed the sentiment of several visiting players throughout the year – the consensus was that there were narrow but clearly identified areas to dump and chip pucks that could challenge the Kings even absent the more explosive skaters that shredded the Kings’ neutral zone at times – in assessing the system.

“When there’s guys coming at us with structure and they rim it from the right side and two guys are coming with full heat on the left side against our standing-still right winger, it’s not very easy to break it out,” Fiala said. “So, I feel like, obviously, it would be fun to try something else.”

While the 1-3-1 neutral-zone trap is roughly a century old and employed by various teams today situationally – it almost has to be context-dependent as it’s a system employed primarily against set breakouts – the Kings have leaned heavily on the stuffy configuration.

Early in the season, the system was flourishing and the offense was flowing, with former coach Todd McLellan adding layers and wrinkles that impressed contemporaries from rookie Greg Cronin to Stanley Cup winner Bruce Cassidy.

Yet with dwindling practice time, the intensifying sense that the Kings had to play the “perfect game” to win (per Kopitar) and their fortunes shriveling, McLellan went from praised by his peers to , who had handcuffed the team’s ability to make on-ice personnel changes with an overbold offseason.

Jim Hiller was , and he had some experience with a somewhat similar trap in New York as an Islanders assistant under Barry Trotz. They frequently incorporated 1-1-3 with similar concepts that also used a relatively passive initial level of pressure and relied on miscues or misplacements between the blue lines to quell attacks and create counters.

Hiller might or might not be the coach next season, and his level of conformity with a conservative, defense-first, check-for-our-chances system might be at or near the center of the coaching decision. While General Manager Rob Blake said , he also said that the Kings were “talking a little bit about systemic changes” and that they didn’t want to stray much from an approach that made them the third-stingiest defense in the NHL last year, expressing reservation toward “a drastic change.”

“We’ll meet with (Hiller) and just go over exact changes that he would feel would go into place before we get a decision,” Blake said.

The New Jersey Devils trapped their way to three Stanley Cup championships between 1995 and 2003, but that was before the 2004-05 lockout ushered in two-line passes, limited goalies’ handling of the puck and engendered increases in speed, skill and technique across every position. Guy Boucher implemented the 1-3-1 specifically in Tampa Bay, taking the Lightning to the 2011 Eastern Conference finals, despite some mockery of his system by opponents.

Yet the Kings have been stranded on first base, at best, during Blake’s tenure as GM, when the team has utilized the 1-3-1 during five of its seven campaigns. They ceded 44 fewer goals this year – largely on the strength of a vastly improved penalty kill statistically and two new additions in net – but scored 20 fewer. That decline was despite a start that saw them top the league in goals per game as late as Dec. 8, only to recede to the bottom quarter of the league the rest of the way.

Despite the coaching change, offensive circumscription and inconsistent goaltenders that, despite stronger overall numbers, faltered in most of the biggest moments, Blake and Kings president Luc Robitaille touted the season as a success in a way that would have likely been revolting to their predecessor Dean Lombardi.

The Kings have averred that they won’t be changing team presidents or GMs. Their salary cap situation is such that re-signing their own players will be a challenge, especially after their stated decision not to buy out pricey stud-to-dud convert Pierre-Luc Dubois (who said the 1-3-1 was “definitely unconventional for what I’ve done my whole life”). It remains to be seen if an upgrade in goal is possible and also if Hiller, who had no prior professional head coaching experience, will remain behind the bench.

What they can change at no cost, however, is a system that hasn’t gotten them out of Round 1 since it was implemented in 2019.

Is it enough to have a decent hot dog, a reasonably priced seat with good sightlines, a stadium or venue that’s relatively easy to get into and out of? Is concessions variety important to you? What about the in-game experience? Do you want a high-energy atmosphere, or would you prefer that the speakers be turned down a bit – even if it’s only once in a while – so you can hear yourself think or actually, you know, talk to the person next to you without having to scream?

Or is it all about winning and nothing else? Do you judge an owner by the money he/she spends on the team, and patience with and commitment to coaches and or managers? Or is there such a thing as too much patience? Do you want your owner to be involved, or does it matter if they’re hands-off or absentee owners who don’t sweat the details? (And, in some cases, might you prefer your owner to just keep writing checks and otherwise stay away?)

We have a pretty varied menagerie of ownership in SoCal. It’s not hard to figure out which ones are successful by classic standards; in most cases, you can look at the won-loss record for hints. But do the standards go deeper than the standings or playoff results?

I’ve got my ideas, as you might suspect. But I want to hear from you, the fans, and not just those who, um, are loyal to a particular team but can’t stand the owner. (Angels fans, I think we all know where Arte Moreno winds up on this list.) What makes the good ones stand out? What do they do to earn your loyalty? What can they do better?

As you might have already suspected from the way this column began, yes, I am trolling for responses. The more you cheer, or vent, the more additional columns come out of this concept. I’m only a little bit shameless.

Here are my thoughts, ranked by order of (my perceived) ownership quality:

1. Dodgers (Guggenheim ownership group, led by Mark Walter): Since closing their purchase from Frank McCourt on May 1, 2012, the Guggenheim Dodgers have won 11 division titles in 12 seasons and have a .602 regular-season winning percentage, along with one World Series title in 2020 – and the organizational feeling is that one is not enough, which fans should appreciate. And they’ve plunged lots of money into rejuvenating Dodger Stadium. (But I do wish they’d turn those speakers down once in a while.)

2. Clippers (Steve Ballmer): Ballmer, too, fares well in comparison with the previous ownership (i.e., the Donald Sterling reign of error). On-court success has been mixed and is elusive in the postseason largely because of injuries, primarily to Kawhi Leonard. But the Clippers have a stable, professional front office and what should be a transformative new home, the Intuit Dome, beginning next season.

3. Rams (Stan Kroenke): They’ve made the playoffs five of the last seven seasons and have stability, with Sean McVay on the sideline, Les Snead making the calls in the front office – including draft successes that are a that sometimes – and Kevin Demoff overseeing things. And SoFi Stadium has raised the standards for NFL stadia, although game day parking can still be a mess.

4. LAFC: (Multiple-person ownership structure including Magic Johnson, Nomar Garciaparra and wife Mia Hamm and Will Ferrell, among many others, with Bennett Rosenthal currently listed as lead managing owner): Success on the field, a gem of a facility in BMO Stadium, organizational stability and a bond with its supporters – considering that well before this team had any players, management listened to potential fans’ concerns and suggestions. Who else does that?

5. Ducks (Henry and Susan Samueli): They’re coming out of a rebuild, but this is a stable franchise with a loyal fan base, and Honda Center is 31 years old but still a first-class building. The OCVIBE development that will surround it, currently under construction, is essentially Anaheim’s answer to L.A. Live.

6. Chargers (Dean Spanos): Their tenancy in SoFi Stadium has quieted the narrative that accompanied them here in 2017 – “Who asked for you?” – and hiring Jim Harbaugh created their biggest splash since the move. Spanos was (and probably still is) hated in San Diego but has upgraded to meh in Los Angeles.

7. Lakers (Jeanie Buss): The 2020 bubble championship changed the narrative for a bit, but the feeling remains that Buss and her advisors aren’t really living up to the standards of Laker Exceptionalism. The circumstances around the firing of Darvin Ham led to a good amount of “do they know what they’re doing?” talk among a devoted but increasingly frustrated fan base. Can’t blame them.

8. Angel City Football Club (Multi-person ownership group, currently led by investor-owners Kara Nortman, Julie Uhrman, Natalie Portman and Alexis Ohanian and featuring plenty of celebrity involvement): The second-year franchise is worth $180 million, the highest of the 14 teams in the National Women’s Soccer League and evidence that the league waited way too long to expand to L.A. – but there’s talk about amid suggestions that those in charge are overspending. Potentially messy stuff, but the organization has done a lot right with its initiatives in the surrounding community.

9. Kings (Phil Anschutz and Ed Roski): Do we know for sure that primary owner Anschutz, whose worth according to Forbes magazine really cares about the performance of the team he and Roski purchased in 1995? Especially now, in light of a third straight first-round elimination, I’d think Kings fans would want some kind of indication the owner is at least paying attention to what GM Rob Blake, president Luc Robitaille and CEO Dan Beckerman are doing with his hockey team.

10. Galaxy (also Anschutz): You can make the case that Anschutz, an early and large investor in Major League Soccer, helped keep that league alive. (That’s why his name is on the MLS Cup.) He once owned six MLS teams but now his ownership is limited to the Galaxy, which is a contender again after several years on the outskirts. Again, better if he’s paying attention or not?

11. Sparks (Eric Holoman, CEO and governor): They’ve always had a loyal fan base, though the on-court product in recent seasons has affected attendance. Now, with women’s sports in general and basketball in particular having a transcendent moment, are the Sparks prepared to capitalize?

12. Angels (Arte Moreno): Remember when Arte was the people’s choice, the Guy Who Lowered Beer Prices? Yeah, I know. That was more than two decades ago. The issue here is that he’s too involved, too impetuous, and should hire a president of baseball operations to talk him down from the ledge when needed.

Incomplete, Rugby FC Los Angeles (Pete Sickle, CEO and co-founder): Did you know SoCal had another Major League Rugby team? Neither did I until a couple of weeks ago, which suggests getting the word out was a lower priority than it should have been. The first franchise won a league title in 2021 and was terminated after 2022. This one is relocated from Atlanta, plays in Carson and has a 1-6-1 record midway through the season. If you attend these games, email me and let me know what the crowds and enthusiasm level are like.

jalexander@scng.com

The Kings, a team that in seven campaigns under General Manager Rob Blake and team president Luc Robitaille has won fewer postseason games than all but three of the NHL’s 31 other franchises, endured rather than experienced this past season from December onward.

This duo of former on-ice stars whose numbers hang in the rafters of Crypto.com Arena offered mostly hazy responses that indicated there was an excellent chance that, in addition to their own controversial returns, spectators would see more of the same going forward.

“We hear our fans loud and clear right now. We know they’re disappointed. We know they want to get to the next level,” Robitaille said. “It’s not about winning one series or beating one team, it’s about getting us so that we can win that last game of the season, and that’s the Stanley Cup.”

Yet these Kings have not won even one series and have failed to beat one team, the Edmonton Oilers, three years in a row. That left them light-years from the Stanley Cup and their position has become further distanced from that prize across three playoff cameos that got shorter and shorter. Their only prior playoff appearance under Blake was in his first season as GM, a sweep by the Vegas Golden Knights in that franchise’s inaugural season.

Robitaille offered the platitude that “every team that gets in the playoffs has a chance to win.”

However, since Blake and Robitaille ascended to power, the Kings have a .273 win percentage in the postseason, worse than every other franchise except the Ducks (who were 0-4 in their lone appearance, a year after reaching the conference finals). They also have the fourth-worst offense statistically and the second-worst defense across those seven postseasons.

The NHL’s newest organization, the Seattle Kraken, has spent just three seasons in the league but in one spring it won more games and series than the Kings have under Blake and Robitaille in seven years.

Unfavorable comparisons to the rest of the league and its top outfits in particular could fill an encyclopedia, yet Robitaille compared the Kings’ five-game loss to Edmonton this year to the plight of the Carolina Hurricanes last season.

Carolina was swept out of the conference finals (not the first round) by way of four one-goal losses that included five overtime periods last season. The Kings were blown out in two games, shut out in another and earned their sole victory in overtime, ultimately blowing two leads and chasing the game that saw them eliminated. Still, Robitaille claimed the games they lost were “right there.”

Blake also said the he thought the team made “progress” during the regular season, insisting it simply did not carry over to the playoffs.

“We still believe this group has made progress in a lot of different areas, we have to find a way to get that to translate into the playoffs,” he said, later reiterating that the Kings were “making progress, [but] the progress is not showing in the playoffs.”

Yet the Kings performed very poorly against the Western Conference’s top teams and playoff clubs in general, winning just eight of 23 games against the other seven postseason qualifiers during the regular season.

They also changed coaches in February, amid a stretch that saw them go from the NHL’s most productive offense to its seventh-least potent one from Dec. 5 onward.

Not only did their game snowball into an avalanche in January, but their goaltending struggled, with 36-year-old Cam Talbot’s game falling off a cliff despite having been named an All-Star. He recovered, but struggled again in the postseason. In both cases, backup David Rittich ameliorated a dire situation but hardly provided a concrete answer, as the goalies played musical nets in both the regular season and playoffs – Talbot lost his cage to Rittich and regained it, only to retrocede it after Game 3 against Edmonton.

The Kings’ power play, which interim coach Jim Hiller continued to run after he was promoted, took one step back from last season (and when it improved, 5-on-5 scoring declined) during the year and did not score a single goal in the playoffs, much as the Kings’ penalty kill, which rebounded to rank second during the season, was exposed brutally during the spring.

Yet both last week’s player interviews and Monday’s executive availability indicated that there was a good chance the Kings could run it back in goal and overall. Neither Robitaille nor Blake said firmly that Hiller would be the coach next season but he appeared to be the leading candidate (more on that in “a couple weeks,” Blake said).

Significant personnel changes might be challenging because of salary cap missteps, especially given that Blake said the Kings had no intention of buying out underwhelming, overpaid pivot Pierre-Luc Dubois.

Dubois is the latest unwieldy roadblock placed in the Kings’ path by Blake, carrying on the ignominious tradition of Ilya Kovalchuk and Cal Petersen. The former was paid to go away, the latter was paid to be taken away and Dubois, now, it appears, will continue to be paid handsomely to be in the way.

Dubois, who was signed to an 8-year, $68 million contract after being acquired in a trade with Winnipeg last summer, had 40 points in 82 regular-season games and one goal and 20 penalty minutes in five playoff games.

“We need to make him better,” Blake said. “He’s had a consistent performance over his career so far and deviated from that this year. It’s up to us to help him become more productive to us.”

The cap will increase significantly for the first time since 2019, but that bump has effectively been pre-spent in dead-cap dollars (salary retention, performance bonuses and a fractional lingering penalty from the Dean Lombardi era). Edmonton was among the front offices that did something similar, but the Oilers are still playing in the playoffs and looking to add to the four series they’ve won while the Kings have been stuck in first gear.

The impression in the room Monday among reporters present was all but unanimous, such to the point that one asked Blake point blank if fans were being told that they would see more of the same next season from personnel and tactical standpoints.

“Not necessarily, I think we’re talking a little bit about systematic changes and different things that may be incorporated,” Blake responded. “We have to understand why the game didn’t translate into the playoffs.”

Two of the Kings’ most prominent offensive forces, Adrian Kempe and Kevin Fiala, expressed unequivocal support of a systemic change on the forecheck from the 1-3-1 to a 1-2-2 or 2-1-2 setup, urging a more open approach systemically.

While Blake said “I think we have to have a deep discussion on that, for sure,” he also pointed to the team’s miserly goals-against average, the third-lowest in the league, and said, “We don’t want to deviate too far from that.”

Blake gave no firm updates on unrestricted free agents-to-be, like Matt Roy and Viktor Arvidsson, nor on any of the team’s restricted free agents. He did say that pending restricted free agent Quinton Byfield would be the team’s focus, and that that prioritization was based on his importance to the club rather than any particular parameter or circumstance.

The Kings regressed in the standings and some key areas this year, and failed to sustain their limited gains against top competition nor in the most meaningful parts of the campaign. While Blake and Robitaille remained secure, there has been no shortage of despondence, dismay and displeasure among the fan base.

“It’s the same as the way players feel, there’s disappointment, frustration, difficult and anger,” Blake said. “I’m sure they feel it just like the players and we do.”

Right now, Rob Blake’s No. 4 in the rafters is a reminder less of his days as the Kings’ rock-solid defenseman than of a flurry of executive mistakes – including one big whopper – that has set his franchise back significantly and for a while appeared to put his own job as general manager in jeopardy.

For a few days this week, it seemed a matter of time before Blake and interim head coach Jim Hiller would be let go, following . But more recently, as beat writer Andrew Knoll indicated, rumblings surfaced that Blake, who has one more year on his contract, would hold onto his job. The Kings’ announcement that Blake would hold a postseason media session Monday afternoon seemed to put the speculation to rest.

Honestly, I need to hear compelling reasons for Blake to stay one more year. Lots or reasons to dump him now. One more year = short-term decision making when we're at least 3 years from being Cup contender. Cap crunched.

— Eric Swenson (@EricWSwenson)

That figures to be as unpopular with a large segment of Kings fans as on Friday was popular with that team’s partisans. Blake’s future job security might hinge on his ability to negotiate a buyout with Pierre-Luc Dubois and reverse that turned into an albatross.

To recap: Blake sent Gabriel Vilardi, Alex Iafallo, Rasmus Kupari and a 2024 second-round pick to Winnipeg for Dubois – a player who had been unhappy in both of his previous stops, Columbus and Winnipeg – and then signed him to an eight-year, $65 million contract ($8.85 million average annual value).

The return on investment: 16 regular-season goals and 24 assists (after Dubois had amassed 302 points the previous six seasons), a minus-9 in 5-on-5 situations during the regular year, and one lonely, solitary, meaningless goal in . The team’s highest-paid player was the fourth-line center by , and that was on merit. Most of the season, Dubois seemed to be coasting whenever he was on the ice.

By the way, a footnote: Vilardi scored 22 goals in 47 games this season for Winnipeg and was a plus-11, while Iafallo had 11 goals and 27 points and was a plus-14 while playing all 82 games.

But this was just the latest in a series of brow-furrowing Blake moves. Forget trying to manipulate the cap through Long Term Injured Reserve as the Vegas Golden Knights have done the past two years to provide reinforcements for the playoffs, when teams don’t have to observe the cap. The Kings couldn’t even adequately shop for reinforcements at the trade deadline because they had little room. (Right now, they have $23.6 million in cap space – but they have only 11 players under NHL contracts, including Dubois. None are goaltenders.)

Blake replaced Dean Lombardi as the team’s top hockey operations executive in April 2017, and by the 2018-19 season had launched a rebuild. Three years in, he started pushing his chips to the middle of the table with the hope of maximizing the remaining seasons of Anže Kopitar and Drew Doughty, the last men standing from the team’s Stanley Cups in 2012 and 2014.

Blake acquired Kevin Fiala from Minnesota in 2022 for defenseman Brock Faber, a second-round pick in 2020 who was a regular for the Wild this year as a rookie and is a Calder Trophy finalist. (Fiala had 29 goals in the regular season this year … but one in the Edmonton series, in ).

And Blake mismanaged the Kings’ goaltending situation. He gave a three-year $15 million extension to Cal Petersen, who then spent most of the 2022-23 season in the minors and . And he , the backstop for L.A.’s two Cup winners, to Columbus in March 2023. Quick, no longer in his prime, and won a third ring as a backup with the Golden Knights, and he has performed well with the Rangers as a backup this year and has a chance to win a fourth ring.

Successful playoff teams need a goalie who can steal a game when necessary, as Quick did so often during the Kings’ run as an elite team. Neither Cam Talbot or David Rittich could do so this spring, though Rittich’s effort in Game 4 against Edmonton foundered only .

As for the next generation, a number of Kings prospects – including Samuel Fagemo (43 goals in the AHL), Akil Thomas and Brandt Clarke – are currently in the second round of the Calder Cup playoffs with the Ontario Reign. But as for a massive infusion of youth, or another full-on rebuild? No thanks, with reporters Friday in El Segundo.

“I don’t think I have time for retooling now,” said Kopitar, who indicated he intends to play through the final two years of his contract. “If we go into a full rebuild, it’s not something that I want. There’s some pieces that are obviously very useful here. And we got to build on that and build around it and … (get) that culture back and mentality and, and yes, push forward.”

Doughty, who has three years left on an eight-year, $88 million deal signed in 2019, concurred: “I have no interest in that. I don’t think that’s even necessary to think about, to be honest with you. Do not want to go down that road.”

So here we are. Blake helped get the Kings into this mess. Can he be trusted to get them out of it? Given that the alternative is apparently unpalatable to team president and former teammate Luc Robitaille and/or his boss, AEG chief executive officer Dan Beckerman, there doesn’t seem much choice.

If you’re a Kings fan, that should be unsettling news. That No. 4 in the rafters gets dingier by the day.

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That conundrum joins calls about the coaching staff, team management and on-ice system, but a determination on Dubois carries temporal urgency as well as weighty long-term impact.

Dubois last June amid trade negotiations that sent him to the Kings from the Winnipeg Jets in exchange for three players and a draft pick. Dubois had scored 60 or more points during his prior two seasons in Winnipeg, and the Kings touted him as a dynamo with offensive runway along with potential to round out his defensive game.

Instead, Dubois turned in a vastly substandard 40 points and a minus-9 rating on a team with a +41 goal differential, all with low intensity, particularly so in high-stakes contests.

While, technically, he played all 82 matches plus five in the playoffs, by his own admission he performed to his capability “some nights, some games and some spurts throughout the season.”

Today, the Kings find themselves in, effectively, a now-or-never position to buy Dubois out and get a mulligan on a contract that paid him like an ascending talent, only to see him nosedive in the regular season and remain a complete non-factor in a postseason during which he was billed as a difference-maker until the bitter end.

If the Kings buy Dubois out before his 26th birthday June 24, they’ll be responsible for one third of the remaining salary due to him, stretched across 14 seasons. Per Capfriendly, that sets them up with a modest cap hit for nine of the next 14 years (ranging from $1.13 million to $1.63 million), with the other five seasons’ penalties falling between $2.53 million and $3.82 million. On or after June 24, that cost will double, and there’s an element of suspense since the buyout period won’t open until the Stanley Cup is awarded, a date that could be as late as – you guessed it – June 24.

“I can’t [think about being bought out or traded]. It’s out of my control,” Dubois said. “I’m a firm believer in ‘everything happens for a reason.’”

The reasons Dubois landed such a lucrative contract or in Los Angeles to begin with were nebulous. A team that was deep down the middle with Anže Kopitar, Phillip Danault, 2020’s No. 2 overall selection Quinton Byfield, spark plug Blake Lizotte and lottery pick Alex Turcotte had spoken of needing defensive depth, goaltending, finishing and toughness before abruptly prioritizing yet another centerman over those needs. For next season, they have exactly zero goalies with NHL experience under contract, yet they’re married contractually to Dubois for seven more campaigns.

Nonetheless, he’d been coveted by his prior teams: The Columbus Blue Jackets selected him third overall in the 2016 draft and, when he shamelessly forced a trade to Winnipeg, Columbus netted a prolific winger (Patrik Laine) and a former first-rounder (Jack Roslovic). Yet after Dubois wanted yet another change of scenery, a situation that created burdensome strain in the Jets’ dressing room, there were Rob Blake, Luc Robitaille and Marc Bergevin, mortgaging the franchise with old chum Pat Brisson’s client, Dubois, a player that was still hyped on potential entering the seventh season of his NHL career.

Kopitar and Danault said they tried to comfort Dubois amid a campaign that saw him promoted, demoted, coddled, chastised and otherwise be the focus of gimmick after gimmick, none of which engendered any enduring improvement.

“He didn’t want to talk too much about it, because he knew he had a tough year. In his case, it was harder, because it was a new contract – a big one – and it brought lots of expectations, so it was a very hard year, mentally,” Danault said.

Although Dubois did not “come in and dominate” as Robitaille predicted before the season and even after 82 largely hapless contests, interim coach Jim Hiller – the front-office’s belly flop was a significant factor in the midseason dismissal of Hiller’s previously secure predecessor, Todd McLellan – doubled down on Dubois.

“We’re expecting big things. We’re expecting him to be great,” Hiller said. “We talk about the passion, the size, the energy, the physicality and all those things that get increased in the playoffs, he has all those qualities and we’re expecting him to bring them.”

Dubois responded to those plaudits with one impossibly fortuitous goal, zero shots on net in the three losses that wrapped up the fleeting five-game series and underlying playoff numbers that were nothing short of atrocious, despite matching up against mostly bottom-six forwards and the offensive-oriented Edmonton Oilers’ third defensive pairing. Dubois finished last among a lackluster group of Kings forwards in at least four major possession metrics: Corsi, Fenwick, shots-for and expected-goals-for percentages.

“He would be the first one to tell you that it wasn’t the year that he wanted to have,” Kopitar offered in a euphemism of epic proportions. “It was also a new environment and everything. Yes, we brought him in to put us over the edge, obviously that didn’t happen, but he’s not the only reason why this didn’t work out.”

For Dubois, the same breakup-day setting offered him a chance to alternate between two at-times-difficult-to-reconcile phrases, “It’s on me” and “it’s out of my control.”

He could not control how he was deployed, where he was placed on the power play, that the Kings made a coaching change, that he moved from center to wing and back while playing on all four lines or that he required a juvenile “points system” to reward him for non-statistical achievements (something that apparently worked, as arguably his least unsettling output came during that period).

His responses Friday constituted a respectable effort from a man who has always seemed charming on a personal level and clearly possessed physical talents, which he intermittently put to use in his hockey career.

Yet less respectable were his displays against top teams this year, and not just the Oilers, against whom he mustered two points – a nifty power-play goal and an unreplicable fluke tally in garbage time – in nine games this season. Against the other six Western playoff teams, he put up two goals, four assists and a minus-8 rating in 19 games, that from a player lauded as a “game-breaker,” a “200-foot player” and someone who would catapult the Kings over the top. In reality, Blake’s Kings have been nowhere near the top, with or without Dubois, having not won so much as a playoff series in seven seasons.

Given the Kings’ effusive praise of and concrete commitment to Dubois, one could easily envision Robitaille and whichever of his pals is the Kings’ GM in June –– odds are it will still be Blake or, potentially, a promoted Bergevin –– taking on the roles of Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert McNamara, insisting on soldering on through a war that’s already been lost.

But if the Kings are serious about winning meaningful battles, they’ll hope the Stanley Cup is hoisted in time for them to slam their fists on the reset button.

Next season, Dubois will be their highest-paid forward by annual average value and their highest-paid player in actual dollars. He’ll also earn more in actual cash payout than scoring champion Nikita Kucherov and Kings tormentor Connor McDavid. A buyout would free up nearly $7 million in cap space to re-sign Byfield as well as address other free agents (Matt Roy, Viktor Arvidsson and Lizotte, to name a few) and upgrade the Kings’ precarious situation in goal.

The circumstances make the available choices clear: Save face or save the franchise.

In the here and now, they were taking physicals while soaking in the gloom of being eliminated by the same opponent for a third straight season, leaving them adrift in a sea of uncertainty.

“I fully expected to be playing in a game today again, and we’re not. Now I’m going to go home, my kids are at school, and I basically have nothing to do,” defenseman Drew Doughty said. “It’s crap, I hate it and I don’t want this feeling anymore. I want to be continuing in the playoffs, and not sitting at home watching the playoffs.”

If Doughty’s tone sounded testy, it was probably because the Kings have endured this fate or worse for the entire decade that has elapsed since their second Stanley Cup triumph in three seasons back in 2014. They’ve made five playoff appearances since, winning just seven games and not a single series.

“You’ve got to build a culture, for sure. The turnaround of players, now, it’s a completely different team than it was 10 years ago,” team captain Anže Kopitar said. “It’s about building it, we had to build it 15 years ago and we’re going to have to build it now.”

Now, more than this week’s schedule and some player personnel might change for the Kings. They made one coaching swap in February and might very well make another – after letting go of Todd McLellan they applied the precarious “interim” tag to his successor Jim Hiller – and could next turn their attention to the front office. General Manager Rob Blake acknowledged at his last media availability, in early February, that his own job was on the line.

“There’s a little bit of concern because you’re not sure what’s really going to happen,” said leading goal-scorer Trevor Moore, who added that he would focus on summer training and that “the rest of the stuff will get sorted out.”

Beyond the bench and the executive suite, there might be yet another even more fundamental change: a diminishing or an outright nixing of the 1-3-1 neutral-zone trap that the Kings have employed to the chagrin of some opposing players as well as some paying customers.

Even Kopitar, who said he believed the team could continue to enjoy success with the 1-3-1 system, described it in unflattering terms.

“Yeah, it’s boring, but we’ve proved it and shown that it can work,” Kopitar said.

Although Moore said the stodgy configuration got “a bad rap,” he also recognized that mixing in more aggressive alignments such as the 1-2-2 and 2-1-2 might enliven the Kings’ forecheck and lead to more frequent as well as better-quality scoring opportunities.

Other Kings forwards were more forcefully in favor of taking an eraser to the whiteboard, including last year’s team scoring leader on a per-game basis, Kevin Fiala, and this year’s most prolific producer, Adrian Kempe.

Kempe said systemic familiarity and the 11th-hour timing of the coaching change precluded an in-season reconfiguration, but that the offseason might be a period ample enough to implement something fresh.

“Moving forward, I would maybe like to, you know we tried some 1-2-2 here in the playoffs when we were chasing games, and for me it’s more fun to play a 1-2-2,” Kempe said. “You get a little bit more aggressive in the neutral zone, you can create more turnovers and I think we have a lot of offensive players who can capitalize.”

Fiala concurred, calling Kempe’s “the perfect answer,” but instead of dismissing the discussion, he steered it into a more analytical realm.

“We could create something on the forecheck. Right now, we kind of have to break out. In my opinion, the 1-3-1 is very effective when they try to go through you. Then there’s turnovers happening and we can go the other way,” Fiala said.

“But if they’re going to rim it or chip it every time, that means one guy has to sprint back and we have to get the puck out,” he continued. “When there’s guys coming at us with structure and they rim it from the right side and two guys are coming with full heat on the left side against our standing-still right winger, it’s not very easy to break it out. So, I feel like, obviously, it would be fun to try something else.”

Even with a potential tectonic shift that could include coaching, management, overall system, some combination thereof or even all three, the Kings felt they had foundational elements and potential to succeed at a higher level with most of their current group.

“We have everything,” Fiala said. “We have skill, we have grit and I think we have the perfect team, also, inside the room, where everybody loves each other. It’s a big family here.”

Edmonton has become more efficient in its disposal of its black-and-silver-clad warmup act, shortening the series and improving the performance of its lethal power play with each passing postseason meeting since 2022.

This Kings’ campaign was a zero-gravity roller coaster fit for a Six Flags property. Its early-season ascent saw the Kings set a record for the and reach the top of the NHL in both goals-for and goals-against averages, while posting the Western Conference’s top points percentage. But the middle of the season brought a freefall of epic proportions, with a stretch in which they lost 14 of 16 games leading to the and .

Their finish, marked by twists and turns of its own but softened by one of the cushiest schedules in the NHL, squeaked them into the playoffs for a third straight first-round series with the Oilers that, again, began in Edmonton.

By that point, the Kings had turned a weakness from last season (their penalty kill) into a strength, and they also swapped early dominance on the road for a stronger home-ice advantage down the stretch.

They jockeyed around the top of the penalty-kill leaderboard, holding the No. 1 position for lengthy stretches and ultimately finishing second in the NHL, after last year’s PK struggled in the regular season and playoffs.

But this postseason, they performed even more poorly than last year, when they were sub-50% short-handed. Their numbers appeared to improve slightly but, factoring in a series-ending 19-second power play for Edmonton that technically counted as a Kings kill as well as two de-facto power-play goals the Oilers scored just as penalties expired, the PK performed, in effect, at a paltry 42%.

“We were first in the league for the whole season and, all of a sudden, it’s a different power play and different players – I mean, the best player in the world [Connor McDavid] – so, they find ways,” said Phillip Danault, who was tasked with matching up with McDavid for much of these three playoff series.

The Kings’ 11 away wins to start the year didn’t transfer to home ice, where they waited all the way until late February to earn their 11th win, months after they set the road record. Yet after the All-Star break and coaching change, the Kings were the league’s top team at handling hosting duties. That meant nothing in the playoffs, where they lost both games at Crypto.com Arena thanks to a feeble attack that produced one goal in 120 minutes.

In a year when Edmonton was somewhat conservative at the trade deadline and the Kings were extremely active in the offseason – they machinated fervently , who landed on the fourth line in a series he was supposed to swing – the gap between the two clubs grew.

So vastly did it widen that the question was posed: Can this Kings team win in the playoffs?

“We haven’t proven that yet, so, I’m not going to say no, but it’s a tough question,” defenseman Drew Doughty said. “We haven’t proved it, that’s the bottom line.”

McDavid became just the second player in NHL history to record 10 or more assists in a playoff series twice (the other was Wayne Gretzky), notching 11 this year after picking up 10 in the 2022 series against the Kings, which lasted two more games. In the second round that same year, Leon Draisaitl set the record for assists in a series with 15 against the archrival Calgary Flames. In the past three postseasons, McDavid and Draisaitl rank Nos. 1 and 2 in scoring by an enormous margin, with McDavid’s 65 points being 21 more than his next most prolific opponent, Colorado’s Mikko Rantanen. This year, Edmonton winger Zach Hyman’s seven goals have him tied for the league lead with Colorado’s Valeri Nichushkin.

Meanwhile, the Kings’ cannons fired in only one game of the series, , with flukes and own-goals accounting for almost a third of the baker’s dozen goals that the Kings squeezed out across their ephemeral first-round effort.

While their offense was best represented by an ellipsis, their failure on the power play in particular merited an exclamation point. Where last year they offset, in part, Edmonton’s double-take-inducing percentage with their own respectable power play, this time out the Kings went 0 for 12 while their penalty kill allowed Edmonton’s man-advantage units to run roughshod over them.

“We’ve just got to play better, really. Special teams hurt us a lot this series,” captain Anže Kopitar said. “There were parts of the games where we were good, we were dictating the game, but we’ve got to do it more often.”

As much discussion as there was of the series , the Kings had been suffering long before the spring.

Their offseason saw them frantically jettison players who had put in tremendous effort to rise through the ranks of the organization in a push to acquire Dubois in a sign-and-trade deal that allowed him to arrive with a maximum eight-year term and a hefty $68 million price tag.

Sean Durzi was thrust into duty when Doughty was injured in 2022, and quickly became an asset on the playing surface and in the dressing room alike, but for a draft pick used in the Dubois deal. Gabe Vilardi was a lottery selection who battled serious back problems during his development and converted from center to wing in a painstaking process that yielded encouraging results last season. Alex Iafallo had risen from undrafted free agent to first-line winger, only to be tossed into the deal with Vilardi and former first-round pick Rasmus Kupari.

Dubois was an abject disappointment, in the season and the series alike. He put a shot on goal just once in the past three games and only four times in the series, with his lone goal being the hockey equivalent of a double-doink field goal in football. His most effortful play was a fierce check on Draisaitl in Game 5, but instead of shifting momentum for the Kings, it elicited a penalty call and, predictably, a goal for Edmonton.

During the season, Dubois had 40 points in 82 games and instead of being the mighty hunter he was portrayed to be, he mostly filled up on low-hanging fruit and empty calories, requiring both weak opposition and strong support to produce, for the most part.

Yet in the playoffs, he was hardly alone in the freezer. Only team MVP and leading point-producer Adrian Kempe contributed more than one goal among the Kings’ forwards.

A lineup that basically resigned itself to three lines and often depended on one, that of Danault, saw its top players largely recede from the fore. Viktor Arvidsson had three points but many more missed opportunities in the series, while Danault and top goal-scorer Trevor Moore combined for just two points.

Quinton Byfield started strong with four points in three games but was decidedly less visible in the final two losses. Even Kopitar produced a superlative game in the Kings’ lone victory – he compiled three points and a plus-three rating in addition to scoring the game-winning goal – but had no points and a minus-three rating in the other four games combined.

Kopitar was not about to dissect and analyze the campaign moments after being eliminated, but he aptly summarized the fleeting hopes of a build that aligned precisely with the 36-year-old’s twilight years on the ice.

“It’s definitely not a great feeling getting the worst of it, three years in a row,” the captain said.