The Center Is Gone. Now Byfield Has to Become One.

There is a version of the next two years in Los Angeles that works. It is narrow, it requires specific things from specific people, and it begins with an honest accounting of what Anze Kopitar's retirement actually cost this franchise — which is considerably more than the 21 points he put up in 40 games last season.

Kopitar's final season was diminished by any measure of his own standard. But what he provided went beyond the scoresheet: two decades of positional intelligence at center, a gravitational pull on the locker room, and an organizational identity that the Kings could point to when everything else was uncertain. That identity is now retired along with No. 11, immortalized in bronze outside Crypto.com Arena, and the franchise faces its first autumn in over twenty years without him in the lineup. The Kings finished 36–47 last season, their second consecutive playoff miss, and the two prior seasons — 45 wins, then 50 — now feel like a different franchise entirely. Kopitar's decline tracked almost exactly with that collapse. That is not a coincidence.

So here is the narrow path. Quinton Byfield, listed as a right winger in the scoring summaries but a natural center by position and by instinct, has to make the leap this season that his raw numbers have not yet confirmed. He finished last year with 29 points in 49 games — respectable, not transformative. Twenty of those were assists, which tells you the vision is there. The question is whether he can become the player who dictates a game's tempo rather than one who responds to it. That is the difference between a complementary piece and a franchise center, and the Kings need the latter. Adrian Kempe led the team in scoring with 36 points, Kevin Fiala added 34, but neither is a true center. Without Byfield stepping into that role with authority, Los Angeles is running a top-six built around perimeter contributors and good intentions.

Alex Laferriere is the secondary bet. He posted 24 points in 49 games, and his plus-3 rating was one of the better marks among the forwards in a season when the team bled goals. He is young enough that a meaningful jump is plausible — but "plausible" is doing a lot of work in a market where the margin for error is already thin. Brandt Clarke's five-year extension locked up the most important piece of the defensive future, and his plus-12 was the best rating among the team's top players last season. That matters. A functioning power play runs through Clarke's instincts from the blue line, and if he continues developing at his current rate, the Kings have a genuine building block on the back end. But a good defenseman cannot compensate for a hollow center position.

The offseason additions — Zuccarello, Haula, Laughton — are depth moves, not solutions. My read is that the front office understands this, that the strategy is to keep the environment stable enough for the young core to develop without the pressure of carrying a broken roster. That is a reasonable philosophy. It breaks, though, if Byfield does not take the step, if Laferriere regresses, or if Kempe and Fiala's underperformance last season was a trend rather than a rough year. All three of those failure modes are live possibilities. The Kings are not a team with enough margin to survive two of them simultaneously. The path to the playoffs in 2027 runs directly through Byfield becoming the center this organization needs him to be — not eventually, not in two more years, but now.