LOS ANGELES — Quinton Byfield ended the Kings’ deepest funk of the campaign with a goal 27 seconds into overtime, securing a 2-1 OT victory over the St. Louis Blues, who’d beaten the Kings 3-2 in a shootout Wednesday.
The Kings pumped the brakes on their season-long winless stretch at five games, while the Blues moved to 7-1-2 in their last 10 decisions, remaining in hot pursuit of a wild-card berth. The Kings stayed three points in front of the Calgary Flames, who won 1-0 against Montreal Saturday, for third place in the Pacific Division.
Anže Kopitar opened the scoring, and Quinton Byfield closed it. Andrei Kuzmenko played on the first power-play unit as well as the top line in his Kings debut after being traded from Philadelphia at Friday’s trade deadline. Darcy Kuemper stopped 19 shots to elevate the Kings to 20-3-4 at home this season.
Nick Leddy tallied the Blues’ only goal. Joel Hofer had 22 saves.
While Byfield was the man of the hour, the talk postgame was mostly about Kuzmenko, a talkative fellow himself in both Russian and English. He, like Rantanen, was traded for the second time this season, having already moved from Calgary to Philly.
Coach Jim Hiller, who one-upped Kuzmenko by once playing for three teams in just two days he said, evaluated Kuzmenko positively (as did linemate Adrian Kempe), despite his lack of preparation time.
The 16 minutes Kuzmenko logged on the ice Saturday were longer than the time he had to get ready for his trip to California after he was traded.
“I had 10 minutes, that’s all,” said Kuzmenko, who didn’t even have time to talk with his parents before departing. “Let’s go to the taxi, ‘let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”
Kuzmenko, who more than made up for any lack of proficiency in English with his enthusiasm, was asked how difficult it was to jump right into an entirely new situation after flying across the country.
“I had this moment, it was a little bit, probably, more than a month ago. It’s OK,” he said with a laugh.
Overtime had barely begun when Byfield drove from the left-wing wall near the blue line all the way below the faceoff circle and lifted a shot that tucked cozily under the crossbar to snap the winless skid.
That carried over strong territorial play from the third period for the hosts, whom Hiller said “started taking the game over as it went along,” carrying their “tenacity” over from regulation to the ephemeral extra session.
“Anything can happen in overtime, but that (momentum) was important,” Hiller said.
In the final frame, St. Louis absorbed much of the play but found an equalizer just the same when Leddy’s long, seeing-eye shot beat Kuemper inside the post at the 4:16 mark.
“I just tried to get it to the net. It kind of had eyes, it looked like it dipped a little bit, too,” said Leddy, who was injured from mid-October to early February and scored his first goal of the season Saturday. “Definitely very happy to get that first one.”
Leddy also made a marvelous sliding block on Kevin Fiala to break up a two-on-one late. Fourteen of 18 St. Louis skaters blocked at least one shot. They played just 22 hours earlier at Honda Center, toiled in front of their No. 2 goalie and were without their top defense pairing. Colton Parayko sustained an injury in the final gasps of Wednesday’s meeting, and Cam Fowler was absent because he and his wife, Jasmine, were imminently expecting their second child.
You look at our schedule, playing three games in four nights at this point in the season is never easy, when teams are pushing for playoffs, so I’m definitely very proud of the guys.
Through 40 minutes, there had been more disallowed goals than actual goals in the game. The Kings clung to a 1-0 lead, but an eventful stanza saw Kuemper rob Pavel Buchnevich on the heels of a hit post for the Blues. Hofer later returned the favor, sliding to stonewall Alex Laferriere on a golden opportunity from the blue paint.
St. Louis also reciprocated in another sense, taking a Kings goal off the board after the Blues had one annulled in the first period. Vladislav Gavrikov’s long bank pass up the boards for Laferriere backed up the defense before Laferriere held up and hit a hustling Gavrikov for a well-placed shot that seemed to catch Hofer off-guard. That surprise faded into relief quickly as a very brief review was able to determine the Kings were offside when they entered the zone.
The Kings’ first period began as a brush with calamity but ended with a 1-0 lead, both thanks to the reunited defense pairing of Drew Doughty and Mikey Anderson.
Just 28 seconds into the contest, Doughty tripped Dylan Holloway, and a mere seven seconds into his penalty, St. Louis captain Brayden Schenn appeared to score the game’s first goal.
But video review showed that Anderson’s last-instant swipe prevented all but the final millimeters of the puck from fully crossing the goal line, nullifying the goal after a lengthy review.
Instead it was the Kings getting on the board first, at 14:35. Kopitar did the dirty work to extend possession below the goal line and then found style in function above the hash marks, where he tipped Doughty’s shot skyward and over Hofer’s head for a goal. Anderson earned the secondary assist on Kopitar’s 15th goal of 2024-25.
The Kings will travel to Vegas for Saturday’s clash with the division-leading Golden Knights.