O Kings the season ended again on Wednesday with a whimper, not a bang.
It ended again in the first round of the NHL playoffs and again with a loss to the Edmonton Oilers, who became to the Kings what kryptonite was to Superman.
The final score of the final game was 4-3, but that was just an accounting detail because the series ended long before the final horn sounded. The Oilers outscored the Kings 22-13 in the five games, with nine of those goals coming on 19 power play chances. They didn’t concede a goal on the Kings’ 12 power play opportunities.
Four Oilers — Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Evan Bouchard and Zach Hyman — finished the series with at least eight points, double the Kings’ co-leaders Quinton Byfield and Adrian Kempe. As spankings go, this one was as one-sided as it gets. Kings-Oilers playoff history has been in general.
See more information: For the third year in a row, the Kings’ season ended in Edmonton
However, for Kings defenseman Drew Doughty, it didn’t really matter what color the other uniform was. What matters is that the Kings are out of the playoffs after one round.
Again.
“I think the whole issue is that we lost three years in a row in the first round,” he said. “Yes, it was against Edmonton. But no matter who we lost to, it would have been the same disappointment, the same desire to win the series.”
And a third consecutive loss in the first round of the playoffs will undoubtedly lead to some off-season soul-searching for the Kings. He did interim coach Jim Hiller show enough to get the team to the playoffs for general manager Rob Blake to remove the interim tag and give Hiller the permanent job? Is this Blake’s decision?
In Blake’s seven seasons at the helm, the Kings reached the playoffs four times but never advanced beyond the opening round. When Blake fired coach Todd McLellan in February he said a new voice was needed in the locker room. It could the same now be true in the reception?
Additionally, the Kings have seven players who became unrestricted free agents after Wednesday’s loss, including defenseman Matt Roy, forward Trevor Lewis and goaltenders Cam Talbot and David Rittich. They will all need to be re-signed or replaced.
And finally, the team will have to decide what to do with center Pierre-Luc Dubois, who signed an eight-year, $68 million contract with the team in June, making him the team’s second-best player. To do so, the Kings only managed 16 goals and 24 assists; Dubois was skating on the fourth line Wednesday, taking a questionable penalty that led to Edmonton’s third goal.
See more information: Elliott: The pressure is squarely on Rob Blake after he fired Todd McLellan as Kings coach
Asked if he wanted the job permanently, Hiller, clearly discouraged, brightened up.
“That’s obvious,” he said. “You know, it’s a great group of players with a lot of character. They made everything easier for me in circumstances that might have been difficult for them. So I owe a lot to them. I liked.”
But change must happen if the Kings want to reach the second round again.
Asked in the quiet Kings locker room if the Kings roster is good enough to win the playoffs, Doughty was blunt.
“We haven’t proven that yet. I won’t say no. But that’s a difficult question,” he said. “We haven’t proven that. That’s the bottom line.”
Asked if there is a next step in the team’s evolution, he continued with the same theme.
“Obviously winning a playoff round. That was our goal this year,” he said. “Working hard in the offseason again and coming back stronger and you know, using that experience, those past experiences, as motivation and trying to win a series.”
“I’m not going to tell you what I think is missing,” he continued. “It all comes down to we all need to be in a playoff series and we had guys off some nights, some guys off other nights. And we all need to be connected. Nothing great. We all need to be very solid and consistent to win a playoff series and I think that’s where we lost.”
The Kings have not defeated anyone in a first-round playoff series since 2014, when they won the second of their two Stanley Cups. But it was the Oilers who became the perennial postseason roadblock, defeating the Kings in the first round in each of the last three seasons.
The teams have met 10 times in the postseason since 1982 and Edmonton has won eight of those series. Only two other NHL teams have beaten the same opponent in the playoffs more often during that span.
And while you can attribute some of the Kings’ struggles to bad luck and others to chance, the dominance of this degree seems inexplicable without a curse. So maybe it’s all Wayne Gretzky’s fault.
Hey, it’s a theory. (And it’s no worse than some of those offered by Kings players on Wednesday.)
Gretzky was much more than an icon in Canada, he was a national treasure who led the Oilers to four Stanley Cups in five seasons when he was traded to the kings in the summer of 1988. In hockey-mad Edmonton, the trade wasn’t so much a trade as a betrayal.
But Oilers owner Peter Pocklington, whose other business ventures were struggling, needed money and the Kings offered him $15 million in the Gretzky deal. In this way, the trade was reminiscent of the sale of Babe Ruth from the Red Sox to the Yankees in 1920, made by Boston owner Harry Frazee to support his declining theatrical interests.
After the trade, the Red Sox would go 83 seasons without a World Series title, while the Yankees would win a record 26 championships.
If the Gretzky Curse really exists, it wasn’t as harsh as the Curse of the Bambino, but it haunted both teams. Furthermore, it took a few seasons to come into effect.
In Gretzky’s first season in Los Angeles, the Kings beat the Oilers in the playoffs en route to the division finals; a year later, the Oilers, without Gretzky, would win their fifth Stanley Cup in seven seasons.
None of those things happened again.
See more information: Blake Lizotte embodies the oppressive mentality the Kings are adopting against the Oilers
The Kings have lost six consecutive playoff series to the Oilers, while Edmonton has gone 33 years without an NHL championship. In fact, all of Canada has won just two Stanley Cups since Gretzky left for Hollywood.
And although the Kings won NHL titles in 2012 and 2014, their path forward was made easier because the Oilers missed the playoffs both times, part of a 10-season playoff drought that fans still call “The Decade of Darkness”.
The Oilers may finally be ready to step back into the light, curses be damned. In McDavid and Draisaitl, Edmonton has three of the last four Hart Trophy winners, and this year the supporting cast around them is better than ever. The team appears poised for a long playoff run.
The Kings, for their part, are facing another long offseason in search of answers. Could they be cursed?
“I do not know what to think. It’s very recent,” said forward Phillip Danault. “But it definitely hurts.”
This story originally appeared on Los Angeles Times.
