Who doesn’t like a good playoff race?
With 15 games left in the regular season, it’s coming down to the wire for these Los Angeles Kings, their potential home ice, and an exciting prospect of winning their first-ever Pacific Division title. While the ladder is maybe a little far-reaching, winning second in the division for the first time since their return to the playoffs (2021-22) and, realistically, a finish for the first time not named third place will be a refreshing recourse that the team has finally shown some progress towards an organizational and overarching goal for this franchise to succeed past the regular season.
Success in the postseason will go through two teams.
The Vegas Golden Knights sit in first place and have been excellent all year, but they have shown signs of being beatable, enhanced by a 1-3-0 record against these very Kings. A playoff matchup would be a rare sight. Their inaugural season is the only time the Knights have played the Kings in the postseason, which would conclude in one of the closest sweeps in postseason history (still a sweep at the end of the day). It changed the future landscape for the Kings dramatically, while the Knights continued to be a perennial heavyweight in the Western Conference year after year.
Their inception into the league is a massive success story for potential new teams to break into the league, amplified by the Sin City-based teaming being a recent championship squad brimmed with talent after what feels like ‘all these years.’ There’s a well-coached and very good team there, even if they didn’t make their typical splash at the deadline as usual. Instead, they made a feel-good move, acquiring and then pairing Reily Smith with the fresh-off IR William Karlsson, reuniting the two original ‘misfits,’ as they call them in Vegas.
On the other hand, the Oilers stand as the Kings’ kryptonite, the death knell, the superfluous hangman for the Kings regarding their recent three seasons of postseason disarray. It’s as if the Kings caught the Oilers in the upswing towards their window of contention while the Kings muddled with the remaining years of a facade, a ‘ready-now’ roster. After their semi-final game seven loss to the Ducks in 2016-17, these Oilers have rebuilt around the four of: 20-year-old Connor McDavid, 21-year-old Leon Draisaitl, 23-year-old Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, and 21-year-old Darnell Nurse. The Kings, on the flip side, tried to make one last dance with their championship holders as previously mentioned against Vegas in 2018.
With the departure from grace, they spent a chunk of the remaining years of Drew Doughty and Anze Kopitar’s prime doing a quick rebuild. With the two former stars outside their primes, management hurled the team back towards contention pursuit despite some massive pitfalls in their schematic. Even with the blatant flaws of the King’s roster construction and implementation, the two teams have, for the first time in Rob Blake’s tenure, been neck and neck this season, with the Kings holding a more favorable winning percentage with games in hand. How that changes the postseason fate, despite organizational claims that the two teams were close last season: “we were right there,” will unfold next month, as the two teams will likely clash for a fourth straight postseason.
It’s never a ‘hurrah’ moment when two of the game’s best ambassadors succumb to injury. How the Oilers will do in a critical time without their two most significant drivers of their team’s offense (both players having 191 touches on the team’s 224 total goals scored this season or 85.2%) will either be their downfall or having to play the Kings in LA for potential games 1,2,5, and 7. This is also a team that chipped away many of its pieces that took the team to the Finals, which includes Kings’ very own Warren Foegele. They lost two excellent players to offer sheets, who, in Dylan Holloway, has become one of the best five-on-five-point producers in hockey.
Sounds like #Oilers have imaging scheduled today for Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl to better understand severity of injuries and timelines to return to play.
— Frank Seravalli (@frank_seravalli) March 21, 2025
Now, that being said, I’m not saying the Kings have the complete edge over the Oilers. Home ice may not mean anything when the Oilers can still deploy 97-29 at will, despite their forward group being as thin as it’s possibly ever been in the McDavid-Draisaitl contention era. The Kings have no match for that, even with a tantalizing prospect of having a third go-to center emerging in Quinton Byfield.
I am however, conveying that this is as close as the two teams have been since their first collision in 2021-22. Home ice could tilt things even more toward the Kings, and there’s a legit chance they can make it happen. This is the closest the Kings have come to becoming a coin flip when facing either the Knights or the dreaded Oilers.
It’s a cautious time in LA sure, but maybe, just maybe, some optimism for once.
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