LOS ANGELES — When Mikey Anderson struck with a rare snipe off a rush, the Los Angeles Kings went ballistic at the sight of their low-scoring defenseman beating decorated Tampa Bay goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy as if he was an All-Star forward.
Vladislav Gavrikov later charged up the ice in overtime to snap a winner by Vasilevskiy, giving the Kings another key win and an emotional uplift heading into their final road trip of the regular season.
The upcoming trip can help define what kind of threat the Kings could be in the postseason as they continue their push to lock down a spot. Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg — three of those clubs are potential first-round opponents or, the Kings surely hope, could meet L.A. in a later round.
It doesn’t hurt that the Kings head into Monday’s game against the Canucks — kicking off a set of playoff-style contests — having swept their homestand.
“We got a lot of big games coming up on this road trip,” Quinton Byfield said following the Kings’ 4-3 win over the Lightning on Saturday. “A lot of intra-conference matchups. It was a good test for us just to see how we match up. You know, they’ve won Stanley Cups over there. They know what it takes.”
Only Anze Kopitar, Drew Doughty and Trevor Lewis on this Kings club truly know what it takes to be the last team standing. Viktor Arvidsson and Phillip Danault have an idea, as they got to the Cup Final with Nashville and Montreal, respectively. But the Kings’ big-splash imports of the last two summers, Kevin Fiala and Pierre-Luc Dubois, have never been close. Neither have fellow core guys like Anderson, Adrian Kempe and Trevor Moore or the current youngsters led by Byfield, who has become just as important as the aforementioned.
It’s always been a time-to-prove-it season for the Kings, one in which a mere playoff appearance is not a high point like it was two years ago, or in which a bad January carried the consequences of veteran coach Todd McLellan, who guided them through the rebuild and led them out of it, losing his job. This trip offers a chance to send a message to those other would-be Cup contenders and the hockey world that the Kings won’t just be a chore to deal with in the postseason, but a team that should be considered an equal.
Interim coach Jim Hiller has said teams pushing to lock up spots are already in a playoff mindset and his should be such. In an empty Kings locker room, apart from team staffers and a media throng, Anderson sure sounded like he was in playoff mode.
“Right now, I think we’re just taking it a game at a time,” he said. “You got to worry about each night. All the points are so important now so it’s taking care of business at hand. Worry about one and then once that one’s over, we start worrying about the next.”
Playing a team like the Lightning allowed the Kings to raise their internal bar. Wins over Chicago and Minnesota to start the week continued L.A.’s turnaround at home after months of uneven play on their own ice. A record-breaking start to their road schedule powered the Kings into the playoff position they’ve held virtually all season, but they’ve seemed to have remedied their issues at Crypto, going 9-2-1 since the All-Star break.
Vladislav Gavrikov scored the overtime winner against the Lightning in Saturday’s 4-3 win, capping off the Kings’ homestand sweep. (Yannick Peterhans / USA Today)
Racking up six goals each in one-sided wins over the Chicago Blackhawks and Minnesota Wild was simply taking care of business against a bottom-feeder and a middling team whose playoff hopes are at a flicker. The Lightning may not be the same fully loaded championship version of 2020 and 2021 but they’ve still got a proud winning core in place that came in with a five-game winning streak and a solid hold on the first East wild-card spot. They gave the Kings a tough 60-minute test, the kind Los Angeles needs.
“It was a fast game,” Byfield said. “Both teams need these wins down the stretch right now. They’re fighting for a playoff spot. So are we. We both knew how big this game was. All the points matter right now and both teams showed it.”
When Anderson emerged with the puck in the third period and scored his second goal of the season with a terrific shot, the Kings had a 3-1 lead and looked as if they would ace this exam with flying colors. Kevin Fiala, whom you’d imagine would have been the recipient of a cross-ice pass on the two-on-one rush, mobbed his equally jubilant teammate. But the Bolts still have Steven Stamkos, Nikita Kucherov and Victor Hedman. And they drive the NHL’s top power play, which won the battle against the league’s best penalty kill.
Stamkos might be 34 now and on the back nine of a Hall of Fame career but he still has his vaunted one-timer. A power-play strike pulled the Lightning within one. And with Vasilevskiy pulled for an extra attacker in the final minute, Stamkos connected again as Kucherov, a prime Hart Trophy candidate, gave him a perfect feed across the seam. The Kings had now blown a lead, triggering memories of the month-long sideways stretch that resulted in McLellan’s dismissal.
But that merely became a moment to “just take a breath” as Anderson put it. It didn’t long for the Kings to breathe easier. The three-on-three overtime format provides plenty of extra ice and makes defending a tougher task, but the Lightning inexplicably converged toward one side of the ice in the neutral zone and provided a lane for Gavrikov to streak through. Kempe found him and the Kings shook off the blown lead 25 seconds into the extra session.
The odds of Anderson and Gavrikov scoring in the same game on hard wrist shots are about the same as comet sightings. The two are essential to the Kings, but not for their goal-scoring capabilities. Dedicated members of their top four on defense, Anderson and Gavrikov are regular 20-minute munchers who draw assignments against the opposition’s top forwards as left-shot partners for right shots Doughty and Matt Roy.
Saturday’s job was trying to limit Stamkos, Kucherov and Brayden Point. This week it will be re-engaging with J.T. Miller, Elias Pettersson and Brock Boeser in Vancouver and then their playoff adversaries Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl and Zach Hyman in Edmonton. What Anderson and Gavrikov do best doesn’t pop up on highlights like their eye-opening scores, but their grittier traits are held up in high regard.
“Those players do so much of the dirty work,” Hiller said. “Call it heavy lifting, blocking shots and staying back and defending, cross-checking and doing all that kind of stuff. I think when the players on the team see one of those guys — and (they both) scored — you get extra excited for those guys. Because you know that’s not necessarily their job and they don’t get a lot of opportunities.
“When they score, it’s a really exciting moment for everybody. Everybody appreciates the work they do, the dirty work.”
During last month’s western Canada road trip, the Kings lost in Edmonton and Calgary on back-to-back nights. Kempe suffered an apparent wrist or arm injury that shelved him for five games, but he’s back and added a goal and assist Saturday for 11 points in eight games since his return. Injury also kept Anderson away from that trip, part of eight games he missed. He’s healthy again.
And now they have Arvidsson back in the lineup. The veteran sparkplug has only played in six games due to recovery from back surgery and an unrelated upper-body injury that knocked him out after an initial return. Coincidence or not, the Kings are 6-0-0 in the games he has played.
While he’s done more than steady the ship and has kept McLellan’s 1-3-1 defensive system as a bedrock — his proactive willingness to change up his forward groupings within games has been a notable difference from his predecessor — Hiller has been steadfast in saying his main role is to get the Kings back to playing the kind of tight-checking, disciplined hockey that made them successful in the first half.
Recall that his run began with an impressive 4-0 home win over Edmonton. It was followed immediately by a stinky 7-0 loss at Buffalo, but that’s proven to be an anomaly. The Kings are 14-7-1 under Hiller as they enter their final stretch of the schedule. Once they finish this four-game swing, Vancouver is the lone team currently in a playoff spot they’ll face at home.
In other words, they could be surging toward the postseason. They’re in a good mental space these days.
“It should be good,” Hiller said. “We’re playing some pretty good hockey so I would think it’s good. We went through that stretch where we had the injuries and slowly but surely you start to get guys back in the lineup. The guys did a great job dealing with the injuries. And now you get Arvy back in and it just feels like with each addition of those injuries, we just kind of got a little bigger and a little stronger and a little faster.
“I’d say right now we’ve probably felt as good as we’ve felt in a long, long time.”
(Top photo: Yannick Peterhans / USA Today)
