Better luck next year: Can Ken Holland get the Los Angeles Kings where they need to go?

After four consecutive first-round playoff exits the Los Angeles Kings are bringing in a new voice.

Welcome back to Better Luck Next Year, a series that will focus on each team as they get eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. What went wrong, why it went wrong, what (if anything) went right, and what is next. We continue today with the next team to be eliminated from the Stanley Cup Playoffs: The Los Angeles Kings.

The 2024-25 season ended in the exact same manner as the previous three seasons for the Los Angeles Kings.

A strong regular season with a lot of wins, and then a first-round series loss to the Edmonton Oilers.

It’s been four consecutive years of this.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

The Kings deserve credit for going through their rebuild in a relatively quick manner and building themselves back up into a playoff team without ever truly bottoming out. After three straight non-playoff seasons between 2018 and 2021 where they re-tooled the roster around Anze Kopitar and Drew Doughty, they were able to get themselves back into consistent playoff contention and put a pretty good team on the ice.

And it is a good team despite the lack of playoff success.

They have simply hit a ceiling they can not break through.

Is it a problem with their team? Is it a problem with the Oilers matchup? Is it a little of both? The actual answer is largely irrelevant because the bottom line is they’re simply not good enough to get through the type of team they are going to need to beat in order to seriously compete for a championship.

There have been big changes to the roster during this run, they have changed head coaches and now this offseason they changed general managers by going from Rob Blake to Ken Holland.

Holland’s job is get the Kings over the first-round hump and take them from playoff team to Stanley Cup contender.

But is he the guy to take them where they want to go?

Let’s talk about it.