The NHL season turned three weeks old Friday, just hours after the Kings played on home ice for the first time.
“It’s definitely odd,” captain Anze Kopitar said Thursday, before the Kings played at Crypto.com Arena for the first time in 175 days to beat the San José Sharks 3-2 before a sold-out crowd of 18,146. “End of October. So a little different.”
The Kings were forced out of their building for the first seven games of the season by the third phase of a multimillion-dollar renovation of Crypto.com Arena, which turned 25 this month. If you count a preseason spent partly in Utah and Quebec, the trip lasted more than a month, making the Kings the last team in the league to play at home.
Six others already have played five games on their home ice. And there’s no doubt that put the Kings at a disadvantage. Not only were the players away from their families, but also the home team puts its sticks down last on face-offs, improving its chances of winning the drop, and gets the last change on substitutions after a whistle, allowing it to exploit matchup advantages.
“That’s huge,” said Kings TV analyst Jim Fox, who played nine seasons in the NHL.
That’s not the only advantage of coming home.
“The fans,” Kings president Luc Robitaille said, “make the home-ice advantage.”
“You can slice it a bunch of different ways,” second-year coach Jim Hiller added. “There’s a familiarity with your routine. When you eat, what time you get in your car, what the rink looks like. And I think for us, in this time in particular, it’s just coming home, getting some fresh air, chance for people to see families again.
“Everybody’s in a pretty good mood.”
Probably because they played so well on the road, taking eight of a possible 14 points in the seven games. But then long road trips are nothing new to the Kings, who had to vacate their arena 20 times in the last 24 seasons to make way for the Grammy Awards. Those multiweek trips generally come in the dead of winter; starting the season on the road, Hiller said, is much better.
“Once you get deeper in, it’s basically as if you’ve got a battery. Your battery starts to dwindle so those trips at the end really zap you,” he said. “At the beginning everybody’s fresh, hungry, excited.”
“Because it’s a little bit unprecedented, we have to be careful,” he added. “There’s a big picture that goes on.”
For a team welcoming more than a half-dozen new players, a long road trip also can be a bonding exercise, especially this early in the season.
“You get new guys, you want to spend as much time as you can,” Kopitar said. “From that point of view, the trip was really good.”
One of those new players, Warren Foegele, who left Edmonton to sign with the Kings (4-2-2) in July, introduced himself to the new fans by scoring twice in the first 12 minutes Thursday in a sloppy game in which the Kings went to the penalty box eight times and gave up two power-play goals to San José (0-6-2).
“First time being in this dressing room,” said Foegele, who said he needed help finding the locker room. “This is probably the rink I played in the second most. It was nice to be on the side.”
After seeing the last three seasons end in first-round playoff losses to Foegele’s Oilers, Robitaille said it was obvious the team had to do something different — besides changing the schedule — if it wanted different results. So in addition to adding Foegele, the Kings traded underperforming forward Pierre-Luc Dubois and the $59.5 million left on his contract to the Washington Capitals for goalie Darcy Kuemper, signed defenseman Joel Edmundson to a three-year contract and traded for winger Tanner Jeannot and defenseman Kyle Burroughs. The team also ditched its plodding 1-3-1 neutral zone trap in favor of more offensive-minded 1-2-2, a formation Kopitar said has made the team dynamic.
More productive too, with the Kings averaging more than 31 shots a game, fourth best in the 16-team Western Conference.
“We’ve changed our roster,” said Robitaille, whose team also will have to find a way to overcome the loss of stellar defenseman Drew Doughty, who will miss at least half the season after undergoing surgery to repair a fractured ankle. “The biggest thing this year was to change a little bit the identity. More than a third of our team has changed. So it’s going to take time for our guys to play exactly the way we want them to play.”
Starting the season with seven straight road games will help forge that identity. But Robitaille sees an even bigger advantage: The Kings already have played 17% of their road schedule.
“You’ve got to play 41 games on the road whether you play them in the first week or the last week,” he said. “We could complain about it and other teams complain about it, but every team has some schedule issues. It’s just part of it.
“You just move on and make the best of it and you come out of it. If you’re head, you’re better for it.”