The Los Angeles Kings have a playoff spot assured entering their final regular-season contest, a visit to the Calgary Flames on Thursday night.<\/p>\n
What has not been decided is whether the Kings (35-26-20, 90 points) will finish third in the Pacific Division or be a Western Conference wild-card team. They are tied with the Anaheim Ducks for third in the Pacific and trail the team in the first wild-card spot, the Utah Mammoth, by two points. Anaheim visits Nashville on Thursday, while Utah hosts St. Louis.<\/p>\n
Los Angeles clinched a postseason berth with a 5-3 win over the host Seattle Kraken on Monday night.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been a climb, for sure, and it probably didn\u2019t look very good a while ago,\u201d said Kings interim coach D.J. Smith, who replaced Jim Hiller on March 1. \u201cCredit to the guys and the leadership. \u2026 They\u2019ve played playoff hockey for a while now. It\u2019s allowed us this opportunity. We\u2019ll see what happens now the rest of the way, and maybe we can climb another spot.\u201d<\/p>\n
Los Angeles, which is 6-0-2 in April, picked up another point on Tuesday night with a 4-3 overtime road loss to the Vancouver Canucks.<\/p>\n
The Kings are 13-20 in overtime and shootouts this season.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe good thing is we only got one more game where we\u2019re going to deal with these 3-on-3 overtimes,\u201d Smith said. \u201cWe get to overtime (in the Stanley Cup Playoffs), you\u2019re going to play 5-on-5, and we\u2019re going to find out.\u201d<\/p>\n
Quinton Byfield, who scored twice on Monday and has at least one goal in five consecutive road games, and Alex Laferriere had a goal and an assist each against Vancouver on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know how important all these games are,\u201d Laferriere said. \u201cWe know we can pass anybody in the standings on any given night. It was a sense of relief for us to know that we clinched, but we knew that we still wanted to push and get as high up in the standings as we could.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thursday night will be captain Anze Kopitar\u2019s final regular-season game. The 38-year-old announced before the season that this would be the final chapter of his 20-year playing career.<\/p>\n
Kopitar has 38 points (12 goals, 26 assists) in 66 games in 2025-26.<\/p>\n
He got his 864th career assist on Tuesday to go along with 452 goals for 1,316 points in 1,520 games.<\/p>\n
It will also be the last regular-season game for the Flames (33-39-9, 75 points), who will miss the playoffs for the fourth consecutive season. They lost 3-1 to the visiting Colorado Avalanche on Tuesday night.<\/p>\n
Calgary had won its last two at home and had gone 7-0-1 in their last eight on home ice.<\/p>\n
Dustin Wolf made 36 saves and Blake Coleman scored the Flames\u2019 lone goal to reach 20 for the fourth time in his career.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s cool,\u201d Coleman said of reaching the milestone. \u201cFor whatever reason, round numbers, they just feel good. It\u2019s not an easy achievement to get to. Ask (coach Ryan Huska), I\u2019ve got bad hands, so even more difficult for me to get there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Defenseman Zach Whitecloud left late in the second period after a puck hit him in the face. He is questionable for Thursday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Los Angeles Kings have a playoff spot assured entering their final regular-season contest, a visit to the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":553594,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5126],"tags":[5,186,1760,240,5303,793,145,5304,5302,4],"class_list":{"0":"post-553593","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles-kings","8":"tag-hockey","9":"tag-kings","10":"tag-la","11":"tag-la-kings","12":"tag-lakings","13":"tag-los-angeles","14":"tag-los-angeles-kings","15":"tag-losangeles","16":"tag-losangeleskings","17":"tag-nhl"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116412144795428704","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=553593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553593\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/553594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=553593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=553593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=553593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}