Kings searching for answers as offensive struggles at home continue

Call it bad luck. Call it home-ice disadvantage. Whatever it is, the offense for the Los Angeles Kings just isn’t working at Crypto.com Arena right now.

The Kings found the net just once in a 3-1 loss to the Washington Capitals on Tuesday night, marking their fifth straight home game in which they’ve scored two goals or fewer. Contrast that with the fact that they’ve eclipsed that mark in five of their last seven road contests, and the missed opportunities on home ice are becoming more and more difficult to handle.

“Obviously sucks when you come up short and you feel like you played a good game, you feel like you deserve more,” said Kings forward Adrian Kempe, who scored the team’s only goal. “But, yeah, it’s been like that quite a few times this year where we end up short, but we feel like we’re the better team.”

At this point, head coach Jim Hiller is desperate to try something — anything — to get the offense going. He shuffled the lines during the game tonight, putting Quinton Byfield with Kempe and Anze Kopitar.

In an even more extreme — and pre-planned — move, he instituted defenseman Brian Dumoulin as the quarterback of the second power-play unit. Dumoulin’s group was slightly more effective at getting pucks to the net, and Dumoulin himself finished with the third-highest Corsi rating of the night for the Kings. Ultimately, however, that group didn’t manage any goals. Instead, they allowed a power-play goal and gave up an even-strength goal triggered by a giveaway right at the end of a man advantage.

“They scored one and we scored zero and they scored the other side. So you can’t feel very good about it,” Hiller said. “They moved it around. So that part of it was good. I thought the group with Dumoulin moved it around. The puck was moving. Looked like there was some action there, in and around the net. So that part was good. But in the end, we give one up, basically on our power play. And I would say that was probably the difference.”

For the most part, the Kings are not getting blown out in these games, and they’ve even managed to win two of the aforementioned five home games. Of the three losses, one was in overtime, and tonight’s was a two-goal loss that included an empty-netter. But scoring so little probably isn’t sustainable on a more long-term basis, and the team knows that needs to change eventually.

“It seems like every night we have a close game going into the third period,” forward Alex Laferriere said. “I think it’s really good building blocks for our team. It’s a long season, and we’re going to need those to be wins at the end of the year — I mean, the whole year. I think for us, it’s just about staying positive.”

For his part, Kempe tried to convey that same message of positivity.

“It’s not like we come to practice tomorrow and, you know, we’re all frustrated because we’re not playing well,” he said. “I feel like if we keep doing the right things and we keep playing this way, the puck’s gonna start going in for us more.”

Perhaps this is where the true concern for the Kings lies. It’s the same sentiment they espoused two weeks ago, a month ago, two months ago. The idea that they’re fundamentally doing the right thing, and if they stick with it, they’ll eventually turn these missed opportunities into goals. Now they’re 26 games into the season, and at some point the hypotheticals have to turn into results.