The Los Angeles Kings haven’t been the same team this season following their fourth straight first-round playoff exit, and general manager Ken Holland decided a coaching shakeup was the final chance to snap this team out of its funk.
The Kings fired head coach Jim Hiller on Sunday after losing five of their past six games and falling out of playoff position. D.J. Smith was named the interim replacement for the remainder of the season in the first coaching change by Holland, who kept Hiller behind the bench when he took over the front office last May.
“We’ve underperformed,” Holland said at the Kings’ training complex in El Segundo, Calif. “I’m hoping that the move will do a couple of things. One, kind of jolt the team [to] respond, and two, [provide] a little bit of a different message. I know when D.J. met the players today, he told them it’s going to be a clean slate. We’re hoping the team will respond.”
Player development coach Matt Greene, who won two Stanley Cup rings as a Kings defenceman, is also joining Smith’s staff as an assistant.
Hiller was in just his second full season in charge of the Kings, who looked lifeless Thursday in an 8-1 loss to the Edmonton Oilers — the team that also sent Los Angeles home early from the past four Stanley Cup playoffs. Fans broke into repeated chants of “Fire Hiller!” while the Oilers poured it on in the second and third periods of Los Angeles’ largest defeat of the season.
One night earlier, Los Angeles allowed five goals in the third period of an embarrassing 6-4 loss to short-handed Vegas in both teams’ first game back from the Olympic break. A 2-0 win against Calgary on Saturday was not enough to save Hiller’s job.
A 2-0 win over Calgary on Saturday was not enough to change the mind of Holland, who said he decided to make the move after the Edmonton debacle. He waited until Sunday because of the schedule, informing Hiller in the morning before Smith ran practice.
The Kings (24-21-14) are still in playoff contention despite falling three points behind Seattle for the final wild-card berth in the West and for fourth place in the Pacific Division entering Sunday’s games. But everyone agrees Los Angeles has taken a significant step back on both ends of the ice during this inconsistent season.
“I intend on getting the team into the playoffs and pushing the group to get where we need to go,” said Smith, the former Ottawa Senators head coach. “We’ve got to get our confidence [back]. We’re a good team. We’ve got good players, and we’ve got to start feeling better about ourselves.
“For whatever reason, we just haven’t had that feeling this year. We’ve tried different things, and we just haven’t had that swagger. It’s a short runway to get it done.”
Hiller went 93-58-24 with the Kings and made the playoffs twice, but never won a post-season series.
Los Angeles tied its franchise records for victories (48) and points (105) last year in its first full campaign under Hiller, but they landed in yet another first-round matchup with the Oilers, and Connor McDavid sent them packing yet again in six games.
Smith admitted he feels the Kings still haven’t mentally recovered from last spring, when they blew a 2-0 series lead.
“I think that particular loss, the way we lost, somehow carried on to this season,” Smith said. “And it ends now. Unfortunately, the way we lost, you could feel it dragging the group down. Maybe we didn’t believe in ourselves. It’s over. That has ended, and today is a brand-new, fresh start.”
The 56-year-old Hiller was a longtime NHL assistant who got his first chance to lead a team when the Kings promoted him to replace the fired Todd McLellan in February 2024. He righted their season and got the Kings to the playoffs, but they lost in the first round to Edmonton, just as they had in each of the previous two seasons under McLellan.
Hiller maintained McLellan’s commitment to defence-first hockey as the Kings’ primary identity, even if it sometimes meant playing a boring style for fans. Los Angeles is 29th in the NHL this season with 2.53 goals per game.
“We all know this job is about wins and losses, and it wasn’t, obviously, going the right way,” said Kings captain Anze Kopitar, who is completing his 20th and final NHL season. “I guess this organization felt we needed a change, and unfortunately, Jimmy took the worst of it. Jimmy did a good job here, brought us to the playoffs a couple of times. Very unfortunate.”
Holland addressed their offensive problems by acquiring high-scoring Artemi Panarin in a trade with the Rangers before the break, but the Kings then lost star forward Kevin Fiala for the season when he broke his leg while playing for Switzerland at the Olympics. Los Angeles also lost forward Andrei Kuzmenko to knee surgery to repair a torn meniscus on Saturday, and Holland indicated that Kuzmenko could be out for the rest of the regular season, if not longer.
Smith was Ottawa’s coach 2019 to 2023, leading four non-playoff seasons before he was fired 26 games into his fifth season. He joined the Kings’ staff after Hiller replaced McLellan.
He is the Kings’ fifth coach since the firing in 2017 of Darryl Sutter, who led Los Angeles to its only two Stanley Cup championships.
The Kings haven’t won a playoff series since raising that second Cup in 2014, winning just nine total games in six first-round exits.
Hiller is just the second coach fired in the NHL this season. Columbus replaced Dean Evason with Rick Bowness in January.
