Untold riches awaited Adrian Kempe as one of the NHL’s top unrestricted free agents next summer.
Mitch Marner, among last summer’s top targets, got $12 million a season from Vegas in a sign-and-trade deal with Toronto hours before he would have hit the open market. With more goals than Marner over the last four full seasons, how much could Kempe — in his prime at 29 — have demanded?
We’ll never know. Because whatever amount it might have been, Kempe decided it wasn’t worth more than his happiness. So last month he signed an eight-year contract extension worth a reported $85 million with the Kings that figures to keep him with the only organization he’s ever known for the rest of his career.
“There’s probably some teams that would have given me offers. But I never really got to the part where that was something that I wanted,” he said. “I’m really happy here. Always have been. Family-wise, the same.
“So there was never anything else in my mind.”
That’s a mind that is apparently at ease now that Kempe’s hockey future has been determined. With 13 goals and a team-high 17 assists, he leads the offensively challenged Kings with 30 points and seven of those goals have come in the 17 games since he signed his extension.
But that’s done little to lift the team, which has lost six of their last seven heading into Saturday’s game with the Ducks. The last time the Kings had a seven-game stretch this bad it cost coach Todd McLellan his job.
“I’m not happy, but I really believe in this group,” said winger Kevin Fiala, who shares the team goal-scoring lead with Kempe. “I really believe this is a great team, great players. We just have to kind of find the game. And not just for some minutes, not even for one game, 60 minutes.
“We have to go for a stretch here, get some wins in a row. Start feeling good, start playing good.”
That might be tough given how the Kings will finish 2025. After Saturday’s home game with the resurgent Ducks, the team travels to Colorado to face the Avalanche, who lead the NHL in points.
If the Kings are to turn things around, they will have to jump start an offense which is second-to-last in the NHL, averaging 2.52 goals a game, and a power play that has converted on less than 14% of its chances, also 31st in the 32-team league. And the responsibility for making that happen probably will fall to Kempe, who has scored as many goals over the past four full seasons as Sidney Crosby and has just six fewer assists than Alex Ovechkin, keeping the Swedish Olympian in heady company.
“Adrian is a bit of a streaky scorer,” coach Jim Hiller said. “A lot of his recent goals are goals that we’ve seen him score before, where he’s either beating someone with speed, a nice deke.
“So to me it’s the type of goals he’s scoring right now that’s got me encouraged.”
That’s not all that’s encouraging. Kempe, a quick and physical two-way forward, is averaging a career-high 19:18 of ice time per game and is on pace to score 30 goals and top 68 points for a second straight season.
With captain Anze Kopitar retiring at the end of the season and defenseman Drew Doughty in the penultimate year of his contract, re-signing Kempe, the team’s future leader on and off the ice, was at the top of Ken Holland’s to-do list when he took over as general manager last spring. And while the length of the contract he offered Kempe never wavered, the price did.
In the end, media reports said Kempe blinked first, telling agent J.P. Berry to lower his salary demands to get a deal done, eventually accepting an average annual value of $10.625 million beginning next season. That nearly doubles the $5.5 million he’ll earn this season and makes him the fifth-best-paid Swede in the NHL, according to the Sweden Herald. But it’s less than he would have gotten on the open market.
“I think it says two things,” Hiller said of the deal. “What it says about the franchise is that the player was known, was drafted here, was developed here.”
What it says about Kempe, he continued, is that he values that loyalty more than money.
“I think he probably appreciates the time and energy spent on his career, getting him to where he was,” Hiller said. “Now it’s his choice and he says, ‘You know what? I want to stay in place.’”
He’s not alone. A number of the Kings’ recent cornerstone players — among them Dustin Brown, Kopitar and Doughty — spent their entire NHL careers with the team. If he avoids serious injury and a major dropoff in play, Kempe will almost certainly rank among the top five in franchise history in games, goals and points when his contract runs out.
That’s the long-term return on investment Holland and the Kings are hoping for. For the time being, however, they’re counting on Kempe to save a season that seems in danger of spiraling.
Like Fiala, Kempe believes in the Kings.
“If I weren’t happy here, obviously I would consider not playing here,” Kempe said. “We have a good core. We have a good group of younger guys coming up. I think we’re in a good spot.
“Obviously you have to take that in consideration, too, when you sign a new deal. You want to play on a good team, you want to win cups.”
And it’s hard to put a price tag on that.
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