Los Angeles Kings Back in the Playoffs

For the second consecutive year, the Los Angeles Kings have made it into the EHE playoffs. The Kings finished the regular season with 45 wins, 29 losses and 8 overtime losses for 98 points. Those 98 points were good enough for 3rd place in the Pacific just 4 points behind the 2nd place Vegas Golden Knights.

Speaking of the Vegas Gold Knights, for the second straight season the Kings will faceoff against the Knights in the first round of the playoffs. However, things are a bit different this time as the Knights didn't win the division as they did last season and the Kings made it in as a 3rd seed in the division this year instead of a wild card. Going back to last season's playoffs, the Kings gave Vegas all they could handle in their matchup. The Kings took the first two games in Vegas before dropping 3 straight to the Knights. LA would win game 6 to force a game 7 but they went on to lose game 7 when Kris Letang scored in the last minute of the game. All the Kings players we spoke to said they haven't been able to get that out of their head since it happened almost a full year ago.

The Kings should go into this series with a bit more confidence than their previous playoff series as they had good luck against the Knights during the regular season. Over 5 head to head match ups, the Kings took 4 of them, including the season finale, and outscored Vegas 16 to 10. Both teams return most of their starting lineups from last years playoffs with the main exception being the Knights no longer having, former Kings player, Henrik Lundqvist in net. This year the Knights will turn to last years backup, Antti Raanta, while the Kings will once again go with Tuuka Rask as their backstop. Rask held the head to head advantage over Raanta during the regular season with a 3-1 record.

Looking at each team's stats during the regular season, both teams were pretty close to each other. Vegas scored 5 more goals than the Kings and allowed 5 less goals. The Kings did have a .02 edge in PP% while the Knights had a much better penalty kill at 84.4% to LA's 80.7%. The Kings did land 32 more hits on opponents than Vegas did. By the numbers, this should be a pretty even series once again and no one should be surprised if this one goes 7 games again.

On the AHL side, the San Diego Gulls finally won the Pacific division. Their 90 points this season were good enough for an 8 point cushion over the nex closest team in the division. The Gulls will look to improve on their showing in last years playoffs where they dispatched the Silver Knights in 4 games before falling to the Rampage in 6 games. This time around San Diego will faceoff against the Tucson Roadrunners. Tucson was able to take the first 3 head to head matches before San Diego came back and won the final 5 meetings, but these teams haven't meet since gameday 128 of 180. The Roadrunners limped into the playoffs with a 3-6-1 record in their last 10 games while the Gulls went 7-2-1 over their last 10. The experts seem to like San Diego in the matchup and it would be a decent sized upset should Tucson come out on top.