Kings Offensive Output; Lessons in Futility

With the Los Angeles Kings’ season finale finally and perhaps, mercifully concluded in Anaheim, I wanted to take a closer look at the Kings offensive struggles, and in particular see how they matched up against the top defensive teams in the league, as well as the bottom defensive teams in the league. Of note, as we perform a post season autopsy on while the Kings failed to make the playoffs, one can squarely look at the Los Angeles performance against teams in their own conference and consistent losses against the teams battling for a playoff spot to see what went wrong…but more on that later.

To get started on my analysis, I took the Top 14 defensive teams simply based on straight up goals against. I wanted to see, when faced with a top defensive opponent how effective were the Kings offensively? On that same token-how did the Kings fare going up against the league’s lowest ranked defensive teams?

Kings Offense Against Top Teams

The Kings finished the season as #6th overall in Goals Against. Note, of all teams that failed to make the playoffs, the Kings not surprisingly, were one of the top ranked defensive teams. The next best team defensively that failed to make the playoffs were the Tampa Bay Lightning, who finished the season as the #16th ranked team. Think about that for a moment, in that the next best defensive team to not make the playoffs ranks 10 spots lower than the LA Kings. Without looking at the history of the NHL, I would think in the modern era this has to be some sort of record to be as tough defensively as the King-yet still manage to miss the playoffs. For more perspective, Columbus finished as the 2^nd best team for goals against with 2.35 average goals against per game while the Kings finished at 2.45 for a mere .10 difference in average. Tampa Bay’s average was 2.73; a full .28 difference from the Kings per game. The Kings are far closer to being in the top 3 of NHL defenses than the next best team to miss the playoffs.

(photo credit to yahoo.sports)

For the next segment for comparison purposes, I took the upper half of the next NHL defensive teams to see how the Los Angeles offense performed against the league’s best defenses, so I took the top 14 teams. As the Kings were in the top 10, in essence, it was comparing the Kings’ offense vs.13 other top NHL defenses. The results are not surprising at all. The Kings played 41 games against a top defensive squad, and of those 41 games Los Angeles were held to one goal or less 17 times and 2 goals or less 24 times. By percentages, when playing a solid defensive team-that opposing team had a .414 percent chance of holding the Kings to one goal. Broken down as straight odds would be in the ballpark of those opposing teams having roughly a 2 in 5 chance of holding the Kings to 1 goal or less, and more amazingly when expanded to 2 goals or less-those odds improved to over 4 in 5 chances of holding Los Angeles to 2 goals or less. Basically and to use a broader ballpark estimate, the Kings were consistently held to 2 goals or less over goals for 60% of the time. I am sure there were a few savvy bettors who consistently made money on sports betting websites by consistently betting against Los Angeles and taking the under.

Bad Offense vs. Bad Defense

Taking a look at how the Kings fared against some of the league’s worst teams really shows how anemic the Kings were offensively in that of the 28 Games played against the bottom 10-the Kings were still held under 2 goals a game 10 times and worse yet, the bottoms feeders of the NHL defensive teams actually managed to hold the Kings under 1 goal 4 times. So the league’s worst teams at preventing goals overall, did an admirable job when facing Los Angeles. Note as well, these stats do not include Philadelphia or Florida, who statistically tied with Buffalo in average goals allowed. In the 4 games Los Angeles played those two teams respectively, 3 of those 4 games saw the Kings held to 2 goals or less, and once with 1 goal or less.

(Photo by Juan Ocampo/NHLI via Getty Images)

Overall, Los Angeles could never generate the offense needed to win close games. When faced against a solid caliber opponent, the Kings odds of being able to score at least 2 goals were almost an insurmountable task. When facing games in which the Kings clearly should have dominated against an inferior opponent, the odds were almost as daunting with only a .35 chance of scoring more than 2 goals against teams that were averaging giving up over 3 goals per game on average. This in conjunction with the Kings going 7-9 against the 4 teams that finished below them in Western Conference speaks volumes. One more time, when playing against the 4 worst teams in the West-Los Angeles finished with a sub .500 record and again the inconsistency of the teams play against inferior opponents should have resulted in some type of change mid-season.

Average Offense by Quarter

For the next bit on analysis, my hypothesis being that the Los Angeles offensive woes were no secret and the coaching staffs inability or unwillingness to change the play style met with equal results will be merited by breaking down the season into quarters and to make the math accurate-I simply dropped game 1 and game 82, (both losses I might add), to look at an even 80 games broken down into 20 game segments. It is noteworthy that using the above criteria, the Los Angeles scoring was strongest in the 1^st quarter of the season with 54 goals for an average of 2.7 goals per game, which closely mirrored the NHL average of 2.72 goals per game over the entire season. The next quarter saw the Kings score 47 goals, their lowest output of the season, but a mere footnote as the consecutive quarters saw the team match identical 48 goal outputs. This would lend credence to the theories that A), the players quit on Sutter and/or B), Sutter was never able to, or simply unwilling to make a change of strategy in hopes of generating more scoring.

(photo credit to kings.nhl.com)

It’s also worth noting that the acquisition of Iginla happened in the final 20 games. Iginla finished his season with the Kings going 9 pts in 19 games. One can speculate what the final goal tally would be without the spark Iginla provided, and once again beget the question of why didn’t they address the obvious need for scoring earlier? Making matters cloudier yet, Iginla in 19 games finished with 6 goals, tied for Kopitar for the team lead in the final 20 games for goals scored. Without Iginla’s offense, it is not unreasonable to think Los Angeles would have scored fewer than the low water mark of 47 goals scored in the 2^nd quarter of the season.

(photo credit to kings.nhl.com)

With the firing of Sutter and Lombardi, these stats could arguably be heralded as a moot point, but by the same token in the age of advanced stats and corsi ratings-surely some of the coaching or front office staff had to be aware of how monumentally bad the offense was. It was the topic of discussion on almost every episode of LA Kings Road Talk Radio, as well as every Kings related message board, forum and Facebook group. At the end of the day, the Kings roster, while not nearly the caliber of NHL top teams, certainly was good enough to make the playoffs. I advocated for the firing of Sutter in mid-season; not that I thought Sutter was a horrible coach as much as I thought he had clearly lost the team and that as an old school style of Coach, wasn’t going to switch from the tried and true methods that saw his team win 2 Stanley Cups. I believe given the data presented above, the stats tell that exact story.

Scott Cahill, aka “The Hipcheck,” is a long time Los Angeles Kings’ fan, a talented musician  and vocalist for the band “Hired Gun Trio,” the author of the “Hips, Trips” book series, a food connoisseur, a hockey coach and trainer, and the host of the long time running and popular, LA Kings Road Talk Radio.

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