The NHL Stanley Cup playoffs will commence tomorrow, and the LA Kings will not be taking part.
Should that be the case? Probably not.
But no excuses, it is, and it is partly by luck and partly by their own devices. As Ernest Hemingway once said to his son Gregory, "You make your own luck, Gig. You know what makes a good loser? Practice."
The Kings will have some things to practice this offseason, but some of it is simply was the situation. There are tons of practical reasons you can point to as to why the Kings missed the playoffs. We are going to hit you with at least one major one today.
The Famous LA Kings Mid-Season Slump
Sheng Peng over at Jewels from the Crown did a remarkable job in putting into numbers the storied winter slump that the Kings never seem to avoid. In fact, this should be a required read for any new fan who wants to follow the team. Get yourself ready for what is the inevitable bad stretch in the winter.
This year was no different. They hit the winter skid, and they hit it hard. Harder than usual.
To borrow the numbers from Sheng's chart, in the Anze Kopitar era the Kings have played barely above .500 hockey in terms of points earned percent in the months of December and January. Since 2006-07 the Kings have a 47-46-9 December record and an even 42-42-11 record in January. The team then hits back hard in the months of February and March when things get intense.
This year the Kings had a 6-5-3 December record and a 3-4-4 record in January. The points earned percentage in December was a .535, which is definitely better than their .505 average in the Kopitar Era. However, January was a .454. That is definitely below the .500 mark they have routinely posted, and it beats the averages for the lowest points earned percentage month the Kings have had going back to the early 90s.
The Kings dropped seven points in a combination of overtime periods and shootouts during a stretch of about a month from December 14 to January 19. The most of any other isolated time frame during the season.
Now many folks are saying, "What's the big deal, the Kings always play bad in the middle of the year and come back to squeak in."
This year, especially in December and January, the Kings put themselves further behind the 8-ball then they had been before. Here is a breakdown of the month by month records for the Kings over the last five years and four full seasons.
First off, it is simply fascinating how predictably bad the Kings are in January and how good they are in March. It seems like this team, for at least four or five years now, have simply checked out during the middle third of the season.
Note that despite the Kings getting off to their second best start in the last four seasons, they were the furthest behind they had ever been coming out of month of January. If you compare this to the 2011-12 season where they finished the season with the same amount of points, the cup winning 11-12 Kings had a four point cushion over this year's team. A four points the Kings would have loved to have had in their pocket no more than a week ago.
If you want to get into the psychology of it, the Kings put themselves in a situation where they had to play and a very high rate for the remaining third of the season. Factor in the amount of games this team has played over the past three years on top of some shifting personnel and that hill might have seemed a bit steeper.
We theorized earlier that the safe point total would be 96 points for the Kings. That was essentially true. Despite Calgary and Winnipeg getting 97 and 99 respectively, a 96 point total may have come with points taken from Calgary. Also factor in the shenanigans on the last day of the season between Calgary and Winnipeg, where Calgary sat several high profile players. Those points almost become a wash. For sake of argument let's say 96 points would have got the Kings in. In the final 33 games of the 2014-15 regular season, the Kings would have needed to get 42 points. That is a .636 points earned percentage. If the Kings would have needed 98 points for ultimate safety they would have had to get 44 points, or a .666 points earned percentage.
Essentially, due to the midseason slump, the Kings would have had to get points in 2 out of every 3 games for the final two and a half months of the season.
For the sake of comparison, the President's Trophy winning New York Rangers had a season long points earned percentage of .689 this year. The second place Montreal Canadiens had a .670 percentage. Finally, the Western Conference top seed, the Anaheim Ducks, had a .664 points earned percentage.
The LA Kings would have had to gather points at the rate of a top 3 finishing team in the league to make it. There are a lot of people who believe that the Kings are of that caliber, and it is hard to argue when you watch them play in the playoffs. But to get to the playoffs you have to also play fairly well during the REGULAR season.
That type of a run is sustainable in the short term, and sustainable in the long term if you are a top five finishing team. The Kings have never been a top five regular season team. In 2010-11 the Kings actually did pull that kind of points earned rate off. And they still nearly missed the playoffs coming in as the 7th seed. They also had Jonathan Quick playing in what was his best statistical season to date, a season in which he arguably should have won the Vezina trophy.
It is funny how similar the arc of the Kings 2011-12 cup winning season was to this season. There was adversity, personnel shifting, and whole lot of points lost in the extra time periods. In fact the 2011-12 Kings team dropped 15 points in extra time periods. That is the same amount this year's team dropped.
It just seems like this year it may have been WHEN they dropped those points and not how many they dropped. Yes, a few more wins in the shootout or overtime would have put them in. However, you could argue that the Kings put themselves in a terrible position down the stretch regardless of those numbers. Again, the psychology of it all may have also played a factor. With a huge task at hand and oh so many games already under their belt, it just may have been too much to ask for a team that was out of gas. They did not give themselves enough of a cushion coming into the final third of the year to make up for other things that affected them. They just could not quite gut out the final two months the way they had in the past.
This idea that the Kings were too far out of it, even as early as January, goes hand in hand with a couple of other factors that we will come to in later articles. Things like differing personnel, the shootout, other teams playing very well at the same time, and the statistical downturn of several key members of the team played roles.
It was simply too little too late for a very tired team both mentally and physically.
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