Black Friday’s first installment of this year’s Freeway Faceoff figures to reinvigorate the rivalry to a level unseen since 2014, when the Kings ousted the Ducks in the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
The Ducks are perched atop the Pacific Division, while the Kings are one of three teams just a point back of the lead. Seattle is idle Saturday, so with a Vegas loss of any kind and a regulation win over the Ducks, the Kings could move into sole possession of first place.
Beyond the quarter-season stakes, styles will make the fight on Friday, with the NHL’s second most lethal offense this season facing its top defense from Oct. 19 onward and its No. 1 penalty kill from Oct. 24 to present.
“We know it’s gonna be a hard game,” Ducks coach Joel Quenneville said. “They’re a good hockey team, they check well, they’re sound defensively and they play a tight system in their own end. We already know that we’re going to have to fight for space.”
Quenneville coached the Chicago Blackhawks in 2014, who were in the midst of their own series of battles with the Kings. They beat them in 2013 en route to the second of three Chicago championships in a six-season span and then lost in the ‘14 conference finals before the Kings hoisted the Cup for the second time in three years.
They haven’t won a playoff series since, and while the Ducks would make two conference finals runs soon after (2015, 2017), they haven’t so much as qualified for the playoffs in seven campaigns and counting.
“Definitely [there’s a sense of unfinished business]. 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,” Alex Laferriere said after signing his contract extension.
This season, both SoCal clubs have gotten goaltending excellence well above expected, though the Ducks’ Lukáš Dostál missed Wednesday’s game with a shoulder injury (Mikael Granlund and Ryan Poehling also remained sidelined). Darcy Kuemper has followed his season as a Vezina finalist with another outstanding campaign, and behind a team that’s currently healthy outside of Doughty’s foot injury.
Where the two teams have differed is in their ability to finish relative to the chances they create. The Ducks had a +10 goal differential (Vegas was +2 with Seattle and the Kings residing in negative territory), also posting the seventh-highest goals-for percentage. The Kings rank 23rd in goal percentage and 27th in goals per game, but Natural Stat Trick has them ninth in expected goals for while the Ducks sit 18th.
On Wednesday, it was the Ducks winning the analytical battle but losing on the scoreboard. They slipped 5-4 to Vancouver in a game where they out-shot and out-generated the Canucks but couldn’t overcome falling behind by a pair of goals to trail early for the 15th time in 23 games.
“We’ve just got to go the same way, offensively. I thought we did a great job moving pucks and shooting a lot. We’ve got to clean up the ‘D’ zone and stay more committed,” said defenseman Jackson LaCombe, who had three points Wednesday, when asked about adjustments ahead of the Kings matchup.
The Kings broke out in earnest of a month-long, 4-for-50 funk on the power play in their 2-1 win over Ottawa on Monday, getting a game-winning goal that banked in off a defender with one second left on an infraction.
They still needed to get some individual underperformers on track, with little fluidity in their attack this season.
Since Oct. 26, a stretch of 14 games, Adrian Kempe and Quinton Byfield combined for just four goals, the same number that checking forward Joel Armia potted by himself over that period. Andrei Kuzmenko has just one goal in that span and three times as many healthy scratches. Trevor Moore hasn’t scored in over a month while Phillip Danault has been waiting in vain for his first goal of the campaign.
“It’d be a lie to say that a couple of us aren’t fighting confidence when the puck isn’t going in, but we’ve got an experienced group in here that kind of keeps everyone in check,” said Warren Foegele, whose own precipitous drop in production was slowed by his goal Monday. “At the end of the day, we want to win games and the best way to win games, for us, is the way we play and don’t give the other team chances.”