EDMONTON, Alberta _ An army of trench coats and beanies marched from the Los Angeles Kings' visiting locker room to the Rogers Place bus entrance Friday morning. Outside, snowfall from a recent winter storm still caked the streets. Up above, ominous clouds hung low in the sub-freezing air, promising another downpour in the not-so-distant future.
Thus, Kings players dressed accordingly. It will be their unofficial off-ice uniform for a while.
Friday's game against the Edmonton Oilers _ a 2-1 loss _ kicked off a brutal upcoming and potentially season-defining schedule for coach Todd McLellan and company.
It was the first of a 32-game stretch in which the team will play 21 times from home. After this weekend's back-to-back in Edmonton and Calgary, there is a six-game Eastern Conference trip later this month, a back-to-back in San Jose and Vancouver after Christmas, and a five-game swing through the Southeast before January's All-Star break, and a four-game trek to the Northeast Corridor weeks later.
A four-game homestand around New Year's represents the Kings' only consecutive home games from now until late February. And if they can't keep from repeating the type of away performance they produced Friday, which dropped the already last-place squad to a league-worst 2-11-1 mark away from Staples Center (where they are conversely 9-6-1 on home ice), they could find themselves miles adrift in the standings long before then.
"It's been all over the map," McLellan said of the Kings' road struggles. "Earlier in the season, we would start well and then we would give things up late. The last four or five games, we take a bunch of punches, we fall to the mat, then we pick ourselves and start swinging ourselves.
"Once we fall behind, we're a hard team to play against. But the starts haven't been real good."
That was again the case Friday, as the Kings' trailed 2-0 after the first following a pair of Oilers power-play tally sandwiched around a potential equalizer from Blake Lizotte that was overturned by an offside video review.
Michael Amadio knocked in a rebound with 6:28 remaining in the third to get the Kings on the board. But once again _ despite a last-minute barrage with the net empty _ their third-period comeback bid fell short. The Kings are now 0-15-1 when trailing after two periods.
