Kings face a hot Avalanche team that is getting better
With 14 games remaining in their 2021 campaign, the Kings have been trending in the wrong direction and now have to face the West’s top team, which also happens to be the hottest in the NHL.
They traveled to Denver on Thursday for a two-game set against the Colorado Avalanche, beginning today and concluding Sunday.
The Avs have won nine of their last 10 games, including their four most recent matches. In those nine victories, they outscored opponents 38-18. Over their past 20 games, they have gone 17-1-2, good for a staggering .900 points percentage.
Beyond scouting the scorching Avalanche, the Kings have plenty of their own issues to address as they have three wins across their past dozen games.
“The puck watching, the puck migration, us as five guys skating to the puck in one area and then skating the puck in another area, it’s remarkable right now,” Kings coach Todd McLellan said. “I don’t know if we want to work hard and we go to hunt the puck all over the place and we have no awareness of what’s going on around us right now. Some of the players that weren’t doing that are starting to.”
The Kings owe their faint twinge of competitiveness for the postseason to a sixgame winning streak that ended Feb. 24. They have not won consecutive games since and only did so once before that surge.
Removing that six-game stretch from their schedule, the Kings have gone 10-20-6 this season. That represents a .361 points percentage, which would be the second worst in the entire league, and noticeably worse than either of the Kings last two forgettable seasons.
McLellan was asked about his team’s body language and sense of urgency after Wednesday’s 6-2 home loss to Vegas.
“I can’t lie to you guys, we need a little bit of an adjustment there. We’ve worked hard for a number of months right now and we can’t give it back,” McLellan said. “We may not win as many games as we want, but, first of all, bring the effort. We’ll help you with the structure and the execution part, but you’ve got to absorb some of that and put some of that into play as a player.”
The trade deadline was Monday in the midst of the Kings’ recent stumbles, and the Kings’ posture could be construed in one of two ways. On one hand, the team added very little and traded a somewhat productive but highly significant veteran in Jeff Carter, which hardly gave the current roster a vote of confidence. On the other, the Kings’ losing both games since the trade handily could be seen as validation of the view that the team may not be at a stage in its rebuild that merits the investment of assets into a playoff push.
“Whatever’s happened over the last week has happened. We’ve got to move on, that’s just the way it is,” McLellan said. “Players come and go all the time. New players come in. We’ve got to find a way to welcome them, they’ve got to find a way to fit in and we’ve got to fix things.”
For Colorado’s part, it spent the deadline improving its depth with the timely acquisition of backup goalie Devan Dubnyk, who won in his Avalanche debut Wednesday, as well as the re-acquisitions of former Avs forward Carl Soderberg and defenseman Patrick Nemeth.