Before the first home game of their 60th anniversary season Tuesday, the Kings honored their past by unveiling a modest Hall of Fame on the concourse of Crypto.com Arena.
An hour later, this season’s Kings took the ice and made some history of its own, though not the kind it had hoped for, falling to the Florida Panthers 2-1 to open a new season with three consecutive losses for the first time since 2020.
For Peter Laviolette the history was even more unwanted since the team’s 0-2-1 start makes him the first Kings coach to go winless in his first three games since Robbie Ftorek in 1987.
Laviolette was a 23-year-old defenseman with the U.S. national team then. He would go on to win 934 NHL games as a coach, the most ever for an American, but he has yet to add to that total with the Kings. It didn’t help that two of the first three games with his new franchise came against Colorado and Florida, popular picks to finish the season in the Stanley Cup Final.
The Kings took the lead before the first intermission Tuesday when Alex Laferriere pounced on the rebound of an Erik Haula shot and put it into the back of the net for his first goal of the season.
Florida took a pair of penalties before the period ended, giving the Kings a two-man advantage and a chance to add to their lead. But they managed to do nothing on the power-play and immediately gave up a goal after it when Florida defenseman Seth Jones scored off a rush 3:39 into the second period.
The play started with Lars Eller blocking a shot from Brandt Clarke between the circles in the Kings’ end. He immediately took the puck and headed the other way, slipping a pass to Jones after crossing the blue line. Jones did the rest, outracing Artemi Panarin to the edge of the crease before beating Kings goaltender Darcy Kuemper.
Florida, playing for the second time without injured captain Aleksander Barkov, who is out six to eight weeks with a lower-body injury, suffered another massive loss when Brad Marchand skated into the right post after taking a high stick from Clarke with 52 seconds left in the second period.
Marchand’s left knee appeared to bend awkwardly when he hit the post and he had to be helped off the ice and to the locker room. He did not come back — nor did the Kings, with Matthew Tkachuk turning a Clarke giveaway at center ice into the go-ahead goal with 8:40 remaining.
Clarke was just inside the Panthers’ end when he lost the puck to Tkachuk, who sent it along for Sam Bennett. Bennett skated into the slot, then fed the onrushing Tkachuk, whose shot from the middle of the left circle trickled through Kuemper’s pads.
When Laviolette joined the team in June he became the Kings’ fourth coach in 28 months. He has been tasked with reorienting the team, moving away from its conservative defensive-first approach to an aggressive attacking style, with defensemen often joining the offensive rush.
So far, it has yielded mixed results. Although the Kings, one of the lowest-scoring teams in the NHL last season, are still looking for a win, they’ve scored nine goals in three games and they’ve gotten eight points from their defensemen.
But they’ve struggled on special teams, scoring just twice on 12 power plays.
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