It’s been an ugly season so far for the Los Angeles Kings and Drew Doughty continues to vent his frustration over it.
Last month, shortly after the team fired head coach John Stevens, Doughty lamented his team’s slow start in the midst of a three-game stretch in which they were outscored 9-2. He called their 5-11-1 start “the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever had to deal with in my hockey career.” The Kings are 5-7-0 since then, mild improvement, but scored just 27 goals in those 12 games.
Thursday’s 6-3 loss to the Devils, a team that came in on a six-game losing streak, was the latest source of frustration for the 28-year-old.
“I don’t really have too much to say,” Doughty told the media after the game. “It’s pathetic, it’s embarrassing, it’s frustrating. It’s one thing to lose games when guys are competing — you can live with that. And you can live with doing good things.
“But when we’re not playing well, we’re not competing, you can’t live with it and we haven’t lived with it since it started happening. It’s going to take everyone to get us out of this, not just three or four guys.
“How are we losing to these teams? It’s not acceptable.”
After a pretty good first period which they came out of in a 1-1 tie, the Kings were out-chanced the rest of the way as they fell behind the pace.
But more than being outshot, Doughty was more concerned about the lack of fight his team showed. Known as a ‘heavy hockey’ team that should at least be a stiff physical test for other teams on a nightly basis, Doughty said he thinks the biggest problem is they aren’t playing this branded style of Kings hockey.
“Bottom line is, L.A. Kings have to be a physical hockey team — we’re not as skilled as other teams, that’s just the bottom line. We have to be a physical team, we have to be a hard team to play against,” he said.
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“We have to have teams come in here and be like, ‘Oh no, we’ve gotta play the Kings again in their arena,’ you know what I mean? I don’t see enough physicality from our team, I don’t see enough compete.”
Since hit totals can sometimes be equated to not having the puck, you might expect the Kings to be excelling in that department this season, especially when they want to play that style in the first place. Their 650 hits rank 10th in the league — a far fall for a team that has finished at least top three in that stat every season since 2011-12.
Sitting with a 10-18-1 record, the Kings are at the bottom of the NHL standings, one point back of the 30th-place Blues who have played three fewer games. Los Angeles is also last in goals per game, averaging barely more than two per game.
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