Kings can’t get past Avalanche despite individual standouts
Alex Hutton
Host · Writer
The Los Angeles Kings held their own against the Colorado Avalanche for most of the night, with multiple players getting individual highlights. In the end, it wasn’t enough.
Despite Anton Forsberg’s excellent 35-save performance and Angus Booth’s first career goal in his NHL debut, the Avalanche’s offensive attack proved to be too much as the Kings lost 4-2 in D.J. Smith’s first game as Los Angeles’ interim head coach.
“What we wanted to establish is a sense of work ethic, a sense of physicality, a sense [that] we’re not going to sit back, we’re going to come get you,” Smith said. “And I think we did all those things tonight. So you need the points for sure, but at this point, you can’t fault the effort, and we’re going to need that every game.”
The Kings have won just one of their four games since returning from the Olympic break, making their push to the playoffs even more difficult than it already was. While they did acknowledge the positives of playing the NHL’s best team so close, they also admitted how hard it is to take any moral victories at this point in the season.
“It wasn’t short of effort, that’s for sure,” defenseman Brian Dumoulin said. “It was a fun game, a fun atmosphere to play in… obviously, we want to come out with at least a point in that one. Tough break putting in that much effort and not getting a point out of it.”
Nowhere was the effort felt more than in Forsberg’s performance. Even though he faced 38 shots, including 29 in the last two periods, he kept sight of the puck consistently and fended off look after look to keep the Kings in the game and maintain a tied game for most of the third period.
Ultimately, his efforts weren’t enough. A brilliant play by Nathan MacKinnon set up the go-ahead goal for Colorado, and Martin Necas sealed the game with an empty-netter.
“He battled for us,” Dumoulin said of Forsberg. “I mean, he kept us in that game. He made some huge, timely saves for us, some really big saves. He’d been playing so good for us that obviously we weren’t trying to tilt the ice for him. But he definitely stepped up tonight.”
The other high point of the game for the Kings came in the second period when Booth scored. One of three Kings making his NHL debut tonight, the defenseman snuck down low to deflect a Dumoulin shot and tie the game.
“I haven’t soaked it in fully yet, but honestly, I’m pretty numb right now,” Booth said. “I’ve always been more of a low-key guy, and I don’t feel much pressure, in a way where I don’t feel like I had to score a goal or get a point or whatever. But it’s a great feeling, and I’ll go back on the drive home tonight and soak it all in.”
Despite those positive moments, the Kings still find themselves in the same place they’ve been for a while: putting in some solid efforts but losing more often than winning, and needing to find a winning streak to avoid missing the playoffs for the first time since 2021.
“We play teams that are ahead of us on the way in,” Smith said. “So when you look at it, you feel like you’re a long way away. When you’re the other way around — like it was [for] us last year — you don’t feel like that lead’s very much. You don’t think you got anything under control. So this thing’s gonna come right down to the end.”
Perhaps even more so, it will come down to whether or not the Kings can take tonight’s effort against a top team and apply it to the rest of their games.
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