ONTARIO, CA. -- After almost five months, hockey is finally back. Well, preseason at least.
And for The Los Angeles Kings, that means playing in the Empire Classic against the Las Vegas Golden Knights at Toyota Arena Saturday night.
Unfortunately for LA, they endured a 4-2 loss to Vegas thanks to Jackson Hallum’s game-winning goal - so they aren’t exactly starting off on the right foot.
The opening period had a slow offensive start on both ends of the ice, with the Kings taking five shots and the Knights taking four.
But after 18 quiet minutes Viliam Kmec found the back of the net with assists from Marc Gatcomb and Matyas Sapovaliv.
And less than a minute later, with help from Tanner Laczynski and Braeden Bowman, Raphael Lavoie added another score for the Golden Knights, handing them an early 2-0 lead.
“We gave up those two goals, but we all in here felt like we were in it,” Andre Lee said. “We knew that if we took the puck to the net and fired some more shots, it’s going to come.”
The crowd however, throughout the entire game, was anything but quiet.
“They (the fans) really brought the energy,” Kenny Connors said. “They had some really good crowd pops, one of the loudest buildings I’ve heard here … So credit to them for coming out.”
Lee got the Kings on board with assists from Kenny Connors and Scott Perunovich, but LA was still trailing by one.
Period two consisted of penalty galore. Although there were no all-out brawls, there was throwing equipment, elbowing, roughing, misconduct and tripping.
And yet neither team could take advantage of the power play opportunities handed to them.
Luckily for the Kings, there was still a final period left to be played.
Lane Pederson scored the game-tying goal with 7:54 left to play in the game, thanks to assists from Cole Guttman and Jared Wright.
But the tied game was short-lived because two minutes later, Jackson Hallum gave the Golden Knights the lead once again after an assist from Kmec.
LA would take goalie Anton Forsberg off the net to add an extra attacker, but this only led to an empty-net goal from Hallum to put the nail in the coffin.
The Kings finished with 19 shots on goal and went 4-for-4 on the penalty kill while the Golden Knights had 16 shots and killed off both penalties they earned.
“There were some good things I thought we did here,” Kings coach Peter Laviolette said. “It’s game one, there’s a lot of new bodies in there, different faces … Tonight I was happy with the effort, I thought they played hard.”
For the second preseason game, the Kings will host the Utah Mammoth Tuesday at 7 p.m. at Crypto.com Arena.