Originally posted on Daily Faceoff
Edmonton Oilers: 2nd in Pacific Division, 104 points
Los Angeles Kings: 3rd in Pacific Division, 99 points
It’s Groundhog Day … again. This will be the third consecutive year in which the Oilers and Kings have met in the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. L.A. has proven to be a worthy opponent for the Oilers over the last two seasons, using their 1-3-1 defensive system to smother the overwhelming offense players like Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl can create. But in the end, the Oilers’ stars have always managed to break through the Kings’ defensive fortifications.
McDavid, Draisaitl, Zach Hyman, and Evander Kane have all made hay against the Kings in previous playoff meetings. It’s a testament to the Kings’ overall cohesiveness that they were able to take the Oilers to seven games in 2022 and six just last year. Now, it’ll be up to guys like Quinton Byfield, Pierre-Luc Dubois, and Viktor Arvidsson to find new gears. If the Kings ever want to go on a long playoff run with this core group, they’ll have to get past the Oilers — one way or another. For the third consecutive year, they’re not in a position where they can rely upon another team to dispatch the Oilers first. Once again, it’s all up to them.
For a brief period of time on Thursday night, it wasn’t entirely clear that we would get this matchup for the third time in as many seasons. Had the Kings not battled back to beat the Chicago Blackhawks in overtime on the final day of the regular season, we’d be seeing the Oilers taking on the Vegas Golden Knights in the first round of this year’s postseason. Instead, the Kings picked up the points they needed to push Vegas down into the second Wildcard spot. Had L.A. remained there, they’d be going up against the Dallas Stars in Round 1; now, that’ll be Vegas’ opponent.
Edmonton: 3-1-0
Los Angeles: 1-2-1
The Oilers pretty much had their way with the Kings in the 2023–24 season series, winning three out of four games. The lone expection came back on Feb. 10, when David Rittich made 26 saves and Quinton Byfield put up three points in a 4-0 shutout win over the Oilers at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. In the three Oilers wins over L.A., Connor McDavid scored seven points and added a shootout goal. If the Kings allow McDavid to score at that rate in the playoffs, it’ll be a short series.
Connor McDavid, 132 points
Leon Draisaitl, 106 points
Evan Bouchard, 82 points
Zach Hyman, 77 points
Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, 67 points
Adrian Kempe, 73 points
Kevin Fiala, 73 points
Anze Kopitar, 70 points
Trevor Moore, 55 points
Quinton Byfield, 53 points
Well, it’s Connor McDavid. Who else would it be? McDavid has owned the Kings throughout his nine-year NHL career, racking up 16 goals and 42 points in just 32 games. In his 13 career playoff contests against the Kings, McDavid has only been held without a point twice. Over those two playoff meetings against the Kings, McDavid has amassed seven goals and 24 points — good for a staggering 1.85 points per game.
McDavid is coming off an unusual season in which he missed time and didn’t quite look like himself early on. However, he picked up the pace down the stretch and ended up becoming only the fourth player in National Hockey League history to collect 100 assists in a single season. McDavid firmly entrenched himself in what has become a four-way race for the Hart Trophy, awarded to the player deemed to be the most valuable to his team. He might not win it this time around — Nathan MacKinnon, Nikita Kucherov, and Auston Matthews all have strong cases — but it can’t be overstated just how much McDavid means to these Oilers.
When McDavid wasn’t in the Oilers’ lineup this year, they looked like an entirely different team. They were nearly run out of the building by the Colorado Avalanche in their regular season finale on Thursday. McDavid has become a better leader and a stronger two-way player over the years while retaining (and even improving) all of his offensive capabilities. As long as the Oilers have him at their disposal, they’ll be a tough out.
McDavid is clearly the Oilers’ top offensive player, but they have plenty of other guys who can carry the mail in the attacking zone. Draisaitl just wrapped up the fifth 100-point season of his own NHL career and does a lot of the heavy lifting for this Oilers team, particularly in the playoffs. Like his predecessors, Oilers head coach Kris Knoblauch has been known to put McDavid and Draisaitl on a line together at high-leverage points in certain games, but Draisaitl has proven over the last few seasons that he can hold his own away from No. 97. He scored 13 goals in just 12 playoff games last year.
Then, there’s Hyman, who has made a career for himself out of riding shotgun with two of the top centers in the world. After playing almost exclusively with Matthews during his time with the Toronto Maple Leafs, Hyman has been stapled to McDavid since arriving in Edmonton in 2021 and has seen his goal-scoring output increase significantly with each passing season. Hyman racked up 54 goals and 77 points in 80 games this year.
The Oilers have some of the strongest offensive underlying numbers in the National Hockey League. They led the league with 2,189 shots on goal, 2,158 total scoring chances, 974 high-danger chances, and 213.06 expected goals at 5-on-5 this season (all figures via Natural Stat Trick). It just remains to be seen how their depth will hold up. Evander Kane, Mattias Janmark, and Connor Brown struggled all season to drive play, while Adam Henrique was an uneasy fit after coming over from the Anaheim Ducks for a high price at the trade deadline.
On the other side, the Kings don’t have a singular offensive talent like McDavid. They also don’t have a piece like Draisaitl. What they do have is a collection of strong, under-the-radar top-six forwards who could perform above their means over a smaller sample of games.
The key member of this Kings offense is Kevin Fiala, who has put together two sublime seasons after arriving in L.A. from the Minnesota Wild in the 2022 offseason. Fiala is a terrific scorer who has also driven play to a great extent while being slotted into a variety of different line combos this season (most recently, he’s been playing with Blake Lizotte and Trevor Lewis).
The Kings also boast Anze Kopitar, who remains an effective two-way top-six center; Trevor Moore, a California native who scored 30 goals this season; Adrian Kempe, who tied Fiala with 73 points but has some defensive shortcomings; Phillip Danault, another extremely strong two-way forward; and Arvidsson, a goal-scoring machine who missed most of the season to injury. And that’s not even getting into Byfield, who looked a little like peak Tage Thompson at points this season, or Dubois, who floundered in his debut go-round in L.A. but still has legit top-line upside. As you can see, if the Oilers are a little top-heavy, the Kings are anything but. If they can slow McDavid’s roll even a little bit, the Kings might be able to use their balanced attack to come out ahead. But that’s a big ‘if.’
After a brief mid-career lull, Drew Doughty is back to being a bona fide top-pairing defenseman in this league. The 34-year-old rearguard scored 15 goals this season (the second-highest single-year total of his career) and logged a whopping 25:47 of ice time per game for a Kings team with otherwise run-of-the-mill defensive personnel. There’s absolutely no question about it: Doughty is the Kings’ top option on the blueline until proven otherwise.
Doughty might be the Kings’ only star on defense, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have any other good players back there. Vladislav Gavrikov and Matt Roy have done an excellent job anchoring the Kings’ second pairing for much of the season while Mikey Anderson continues to settle in as Doughty’s regular partner on the top unit. The third pairing is a bit more of an adventure: Andreas Englund still hasn’t really proven he can hold his own as an NHL regular and it remains to be seen whether the Kings eventually turn to Brandt Clarke in that spot for an additional jolt of energy against this supercharged Oilers team.
On the whole, the Kings have been greater defensively than the sum of their parts would initially indicate. They finished the 2023–24 season having allowed just 143 goals at 5-on-5, the fifth-fewest in the league, and that result falls roughly in line with their shots, chances, and expected goals against. They also finished ahead of the Oilers in each of those categories.
Edmonton’s defensive group is led by the pairing of Evan Bouchard and Mattias Ekholm, which has been a puck-possession dynamo all season long. Bouchard is a skilled, slick offensive defenseman who has been a fixture on the Oilers’ top power-play unit since Tyson Barrie’s departure last season. Coincidentally, the Oilers sent Barrie to the Nashville Predators as part of a package to acquire Ekholm, who has arguably been the team’s No. 1 defenseman ever since. Save for a few defensive miscues here and there, Bouchard and Ekholm have formed a fantastic pairing.
However, there are legitimate questions about how Darnell Nurse and Cody Ceci will fare in the playoffs after another very up-and-down year together on the Oilers’ second pair. The Oilers have generally decreased the Nurse-Ceci pairing’s usage against top opponents while giving more slack to the Ekholm-Bouchard pairing and even the likes of Brett Kulak and Vincent Desharnais. Nurse and Ceci make a lot of money and have proven themselves capable of playing big minutes in the past. They’ll need to be at their best when the games get tougher in the playoffs.
The Oilers could’ve been more aggressive in the goaltending market this season. In the end, they chose to ride with who they already have. Right now, that means Stuart Skinner and Calvin Pickard, neither of whom has proven they can be a top-tier No. 1 goaltender in this league.
Skinner, who turned 25 in November, will almost certainly be the Oilers’ Game 1 starter against the Kings. After emerging from relative obscurity to supplant Jack Campbell as the Oilers’ top goaltender last year, Skinner appeared in 58 games this season and went 36-15-5 with a .907 save percentage. Solid, but unspectacular. For his part, Pickard went 12-7-1 with a .908 save percentage in 22 outings with this year’s Oilers team.
Who knows whether we’ll see Campbell back up with the Oilers at any point during this upcoming run. To his credit, the 32-year-old netminder has rebounded nicely in the AHL after a subpart start to his tenure with the Bakersfield Condors. Campbell is 17-13-1 with a .919 save percentage in 32 AHL games this year; he has three seasons remaining after this one on his contract, which carries a $5 million NHL cap hit.
The Kings’ starting goaltender for much of this season has been former Oiler Cam Talbot, who has largely done a bang-up job. The wily veteran is 26-20-6 with three shutouts and a .915 save percentage through his first 53 games in L.A., and he also represented the Kings at the 2024 NHL All-Star Game.
Coincidentally, Talbot spent the 2019–20 season playing with David Rittich in Calgary. Rittich is Talbot’s tandem partner once again in L.A. and has put up some of the very best numbers of his NHL career, recording three shutouts in just 24 games and going 13-6-3 with a sparkling .921 save percentage.
Neither Edmonton nor L.A. has a Vezina-caliber goaltender. It’s debatable whether either team has a No. 1 goaltender. On paper, this isn’t a series that will be won between the pipes.
The Kings are entering this series with a relatively full roster, particularly since they got Arvidsson back in February after his long recovery from back surgery. At this time, there are only two Kings players currently on long-term injured reserve. One of them is goaltender Pheonix Copley, who will miss the rest of the season with an ACL injury; the other is forward Carl Grundstrom, who was assigned to the AHL’s Ontario Reign on a conditioning stint earlier this week as he continues to rehab a lower-body injury.
Conversely, the Oilers are fully healthy entering this year’s postseason. There have been lingering questions all year long about whether McDavid has truly been 100 percent in the games he’s played, but there’s no reason to believe he won’t be ready to go for Game 1 against the Kings.
This is a battle between two teams that both fired their head coach earlier this season. After an awful start to the year, the Oilers relieved Jay Woodcroft of his duties on Nov. 12 and subsequently replaced him with Kris Knoblauch. The move reunited Connor McDavid with his old OHL coach, and although it’s fair to suggest the Oilers might’ve still rebounded had they kept Woodcroft around, there’s no arguing with Knoblauch’s 46-18-5 record over the final 69 games of the regular season.
The Kings waited a little bit longer to fire Todd McLellan, who is now both a former Kings and Oilers head coach. They parted ways with McLellan on Feb. 2 after falling into a 3-8-6 rut over his final 17 games behind the bench. The Kings haven’t hired a full-time replacement as of yet, but interim head coach Jim Hiller could secure the gig if he can lead this team past the Oilers in the first round. Hiller guided the Kings to a 21-12-1 record down the stretch.
Nothing about this matchup is particularly novel. The Oilers and Kings don’t look exactly the same as they did in their 2022 and 2023 meetings, but all the fundamentals are still in place. It’ll take a near-perfect display from this Kings team to push this series to seven games, let alone win it. For all the flaws the Oilers have, the Kings’ are simply more pronounced and tougher to overlook.
The playoff history is there. The season series strongly favored the Oilers. On paper, the Oilers have an overwhelming advantage at forward and are roughly on par with — if not slightly ahead of — the Kings everywhere else. Although it’s not difficult to imagine the Kings grinding out a win or two (especially with control over matchups on home ice), it’d be a major upset if they were to topple the Oilers in the first round.
Oilers in six games.
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Originally posted on Daily Faceoff
Published: 7 months ago
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