The Washington Capitals will host the Los Angeles Kings, the NHL’s only team still without a win this season, on Tuesday night.
Entering the game at Capital One Arena, the Kings are 0-4-2, having lost their last two regulation games to the Edmonton Oilers and Boston Bruins by a combined 8-2 score. Both contests were on home ice at Crypto.com Arena, and now the Kings head out on a long road trip, playing five games in eight days, with the Capitals first on the schedule.
Ahead of the 2026-27 campaign, the Kings dismissed interim bench boss DJ Smith and brought in veteran head coach Peter Laviolette. Laviolette did not coach in the NHL during the 2025-26 season, his first year without a job since he became head coach of the ECHL’s Wheeling Nailers in 1997-98.
While the Kings’ record is eyebrow-raising, they are actually one of the better teams in the NHL at five-on-five, earning 50.6 percent of shot attempts, 53.9 percent of expected goals, and 59.3 percent of high-danger chances. However, they haven’t turned that control into offense, with a league-worst five-on-five shooting percentage of 4.71 percent and just 12 total goals so far this season. Their 94.0 PDO (shooting percentage plus save percentage) is the second-worst in the league — only the Calgary Flames, who are 2-6-0, are more unlucky at a staggering 91.7.
“I think we’ve had some (chances),” Laviolette told NHL.com’s Tom Gulitti. “We’re pushing for more. Every game has been a little bit different with regard to that. I thought we had some really good chances against Edmonton, had good chances in the first period against Boston and San Jose. We had just a ton of chances early on. I think we hit the post in the first five games, maybe 10 times.
“So those things don’t really help with regard to getting to the back of the net. So, we’ve just got to keep pushing and find a way to score goals.”
Laviolette has a reputation for stymying his teams’ offensive potential to focus on locking down the opposition, employing what some call the “Lavy Lock”, a conservative approach to forecheck pressure and neutral-zone management. Instead of pressuring the other team with two forwards in the offensive zone, Laviolette’s teams typically utilize a 1-3-1 or 2-3 setup, prioritizing creating a wall in front of their own blueline.
Staying compact eliminates stretch passes and rush chances for the other team, ideally forcing opponents to either turn the puck over trying to enter the zone with control or dump it deep, allowing Laviolette’s team to quickly recover it. However, it also limits your own offense, as most of your players are aligned closer to their own end once they gain possession of the puck — a philosophy Evgeny Kuznetsov once derided.
Defenseman Brandt Clarke leads the Kings with five points (1g, 4a). Only two players, Artemi Panarin (3) and Alex Laferriere (2), have scored more than one goal. Only seven of their players have even recorded more than one point. For comparison’s sake, the Capitals have 14 players with more than one point in their eight games.
The 2026-27 season also represents the club’s first without star center Anze Kopitar since the 2005-06 campaign. Kopitar, the team captain for the past decade, is LA’s all-time leading scorer (1,316 points) and all-time top assist man (864). Even in his final season with the team, at age 38, he was averaging 19:07 of ice time per game.
Beyond getting almost no scoring from their forwards or defensemen, the Kings are struggling between the pipes, too. They are giving up the third-most goals per game in the NHL (4.17), with Darcy Kuemper currently posting an .847 save percentage and Anton Forsberg a slightly better .883. According to MoneyPuck, Kuemper has allowed 5.3 more goals than expected, while Forsberg has allowed 2.1 more.
The Kings are also getting blown out of every special teams battle so far this year, with the seventh-worst power play (14.3 percent) and the second-worst penalty kill (61.9 percent). They allow more than one power-play goal per game, giving up eight on just 21 opposing opportunities. However, they have also already scored two shorthanded goals.
As they seek their first win of the season against the Capitals on Tuesday, the Kings face one of their toughest Eastern Conference opponents in recent years. Since the 2019-20 season, the Capitals are 11-3-0 against Los Angeles, and only one of those three losses, on December 19, 2021, came at Capital One Arena.
