The 37-48 record lied. Here's what the final ten games were actually saying.
When the Kings finished last season 6-4 in their final ten games, outscoring opponents by 0.6 goals per game in that stretch, most people filed it under "too little, too late." A team that went 1-5 in February and lost seven straight to close out April doesn't get credit for a late surge. The record was 37-48, and that number swallowed everything else. But those final ten games weren't garbage time. They were a preview.
The early evidence from 2026-27 camp and preseason says so. The Kings have scored 3.6 goals per game over their last ten contests, up from 2.7 in the prior twenty — a 0.9-goal jump that doesn't happen by accident on a roster this young and this depleted. They've also tightened defensively, allowing 3.0 per game in that same span after giving up 3.5 in the preceding stretch. Both numbers moving in the right direction simultaneously is the part that matters. Teams rebuilding on the fly usually fix one side of the ice at a time. The Kings appear to be fixing both.
The player the numbers point toward most clearly is Brandt Clarke. He posted a plus-12 rating across 52 games last season — the best plus-minus on a team that finished minus-heavy — and his five-year, $37 million extension signals the organization sees what the box score confirms: the blue line reorganization around him is the structural reason the defensive numbers are moving. Last season's 37-48 record was built on a roster that still had Kopitar in the middle for 40 games and Fiala for 48, yet couldn't stay afloat. The question entering this year was whether removing both would accelerate the collapse. The early answer is that it hasn't.
That's where Adrian Kempe and Quinton Byfield become the real argument. Kempe led the team with 36 points last season; Byfield contributed 29 in the same number of games. Neither number screams franchise savior, but both players were operating in Kopitar's shadow, logging their ice time behind a center who commanded defensive attention for two decades. With Kopitar retired and Fiala sidelined, the offensive load falls on them directly — and the 3.6 goals per game in the last ten suggests they are absorbing it rather than buckling under it. That's the number the narrative hasn't caught up to yet.
None of this erases the real concerns. Jan Jenik and Jakub Dvorak are both on injured reserve, Fiala's return timeline is genuinely uncertain, and a 37-48 team doesn't become a playoff contender by going 6-4 to close out a lost season and then looking sharp in preseason. The Western Conference is unforgiving. But the conventional read on this roster — that losing Kopitar and Fiala simultaneously meant the floor was about to drop out — is being challenged by the only thing that should challenge a narrative: the numbers going the other way. The 37-48 record was the ceiling of what this group could do with its old identity. What the last ten games of that season and the early returns of this one suggest is that a different, younger identity is forming underneath it, and it's forming faster than the final standings implied.