Kings winger Alex Laferriere was a psychology major at Harvard, but even he couldn’t quite analyze his emotions after signing a three-year, $12.3 million contract extension over the weekend.
“It’s definitely pretty surreal,” said Laferriere, 23, of his first extension. “With signing an entry-level contract, you don’t really know what’s gonna happen. You could be up and down throughout it, but now signing this contract feels definitely surreal. It hasn’t really set in yet, but I’m just excited to be back and get going.”
Laferriere was an under-the-radar prospect, one that didn’t stand out because of his size and ultimately has proven more of a jack of all trades than a specialist. The Kings drafted him 83rd overall in 2020 before he made the team out of camp two years ago and finished an eyelash shy of 20 goals last season.
Now, he’s back on a bridge deal with a cap hit of $4.1 million – the payout structure is $3.5 million cash in Year 1, then $4.4 million in each of the final two campaigns – something he said worked for both team and player. It will make him an arbitration-eligible restricted free agent upon expiring, giving both sides flexibility while the cap raises significantly from year to year as the league emerges from the shadow of its emergency CBA during the pandemic.
“I think a three-year deal puts me in the best position for my career. It gives me a little bit of extra time before that next contract,” Laferriere said. “With the kind of layout of our team, you don’t know what’s going to happen, and giving myself three years to make a bigger impact on the team and solidify myself in a bigger role just seemed like the right thing to do.”
From the March 7 trade deadline onward, the Kings’ top nine forwards were essentially unchanged and that mix brought a period of unforeseen and perhaps uncharacteristic offense for the Kings. Having been bottled up from November 2023 to March 2025, the better part of two seasons, the Kings turned around their 27th-ranked offense and wildly inconsistent power play to rank among the NHL’s highest-scoring and more efficient squads down the stretch last season.
Laferriere jelled with Quinton Byfield and Kevin Fiala when they were reunited during that time period, with Fiala and Byfield never missing an opportunity to show their appreciation for their less flashy linemate. Laferriere grew his game, skating into more opportunities and scoring from distance on occasion last season.
On Wednesday, Laferriere described his optimism about the Kings’ situation, keeping that same group of nine attackers together while adding loads of Stanley Cup experience. Corey Perry won the Cup with the Ducks and has also appeared in five of the past six Stanley Cup Final series, losing all five. Joel Armia was teammates with Perry as well as Phillip Danault and Joel Edmundson when they made a Cinderella run to the 2021 Final with Montreal. Brian Dumoulin won two Cups in Pittsburgh and Cody Ceci went all the way to Game 7 of the 2024 Final with Edmonton.
“Looking at last year, we were right there, and I think all of us are super confident in each other, and we know how close we are as a group, and how much further we can go,” said Laferriere, adding that new general manager Ken Holland extolled the virtue of adding even more postseason seasoning.
Simultaneously, however, Laferriere acknowledged the frustration of having lost four consecutive first-round series to the Oilers, with the Kings’ playoff glory being less for the game programs and more for the history books. The Kings’ most recent loss to Edmonton was their most heartbreaking, as they mounted a 2-0 series lead as well as advantages in Games 3, 4, 5 and 6, all of which they ended up losing in a deflating reverse sweep.
So, do the Kings have unfinished business?
“Yeah, definitely. Looking around our locker room, you see guys like (Anže Kopitar and Drew Doughty). Those guys have won before, and we haven’t won a playoff series since those guys won [the Stanley Cup] in 2014,” Laferriere said. “You can see how badly they want it, and it shows in the locker room every day, how bad they want it. So it definitely rubs off on everybody else in the locker room, and I think it definitely makes us want it even more.”