11/3 Preview – Searching For Swagger At Home + Mikey’s Minutes, Familiar Winnipeg Faces, Perry Prepared For Milestone

WHO: Los Angeles Kings (5-4-4) vs. Winnipeg Jets (9-3-0)
WHAT: 2025 Regular-Season Game 14/82
WHEN: Tuesday, November 3 @ 7:30 PM Pacific
WHERE: Crypto.com Arena – Los Angeles, CA
HOW TO FOLLOW: VIDEO: FanDuel Sports Network – AUDIO – ESPN LA App & LA Kings App – TWITTER: @jaredshafran & @lakings

TODAY’S MATCHUP: The Kings play the third contest of their four-game homestand tonight against the Winnipeg Jets at Crypto.com Arena.

HEAD-TO-HEAD: Tuesday’s matchup will be the second of three this season between the Western Conference foes. The Jets claimed the first battle with a 3-2 decision on Oct. 11. The final faceoff between the clubs will be in Winnipeg on Jan. 9. A year ago, LA went 3-0-0 against the Presidents Trophy winners, with forward Adrian Kempe leading the way by scoring six points (3-3-6). Kempe also had a goal and an assist in the most recent meeting of the clubs last month, while Mikey Anderson scored his only goal to date this year.

KINGS VITALS: After a full practice yesterday in El Segundo, the Kings held an optional morning skate in advance of tonight’s game.

Without the full group on the ice, it’s unconfirmed who will get the start in between the pipes this evening, but I’d lean towards it being Darcy Kuemper, as Anton Forsberg was the lone netminder out there. Should the Kings go back to Kuemper, he would be seeing Winnipeg for the second time this season after stopping 24 of 27 in the team’s third game of 2025-26. Kuemper has strong career splits against the Jets, posting an 8-3-0 record lifetime, with a .918 save percentage and a 2.65 goals-against average.

No line rushes today, but posting yesterday’s practice alignment below –

Armia – Kopitar – Kempe
Fiala – Byfield – Laferriere
Kuzmenko – Danault – Moore
Malott – Turcotte – Perry
Helenius

Anderson – Doughty
Edmundson – Clarke
Dumoulin – Ceci
Moverare

Kuemper / Forsberg

Had a more detailed breakdown of the changes to the Kings alignment in yesterday afternoon’s practice report. Jim Hiller confirmed that we can expect to see those changes stick to begin tonight’s game, with Joel Armia moving up to play on the top trio alongside Anze Kopitar and Adrian Kempe, while Andre Kuzmenko joins Phillip Danault and Trevor Moore. Defensively, Mikey Anderson and Drew Doughty were reunited, while Brian Dumoulin was next to Cody Cedi as they were for the first three games of the year. Funny enough, it was the next morning’s practice after the game in Winnipeg last month when those pairs initially got shuffled. Forward Warren Foegele remains out of the lineup and is expected to miss his fourth consecutive game tonight with an upper-body injury. He was, however, on the ice with the group for the optional skate while wearing a red non-contact jersey. Hiller confirmed that he is getting closer to returning and would probably travel with the team on their upcoming five-game road swing next week.

JETS VITALS: Winnipeg is opening up a six-game road trip after recent home wins over Chicago and Pittsburgh. The Jets have won four of their last five outings and currently sit in second place in the Central Division, one point back of Colorado.

Per Mitchell Clinton, here’s how the Jets lined up at practice on Monday morning –

#NHLJets line rushes (no Barron or Nyquist)

Connor-Scheifele-Vilardi
Namestnikov-Toews-Iafallo
Niederreiter-Lowry-Pearson
Koepke-Ford-Lambert
Chibrikov

Morrissey-DeMelo
Stanley-Pionk
Miller-Schenn
Fleury

Perfetti, Samberg (non-contact)

Hellebuyck
Comrie

— Mitchell Clinton (@MitchellClinton) November 3, 2025

The big news out of Winnipeg on Monday was the confirmation that team captain Adam Lowry would make his season debut in LA tonight. Lowry underwent hip surgery during the offseason. The Jets have been led offensively by forward Mark Scheifele this season, who has 20 points on nine goals and 11 assists from the team’s first 12 games. His linemate Kyle Connor also does a lot of scoring and has 17 points with eight goals and nine assists, along with a share of the plus-minus lead at +11.

With Eric Comrie getting the win in goal for the Jets against Pittsburgh their last time out, all signs point to reigning Vezina Trophy winner Connor Hellebuyck getting the start in the crease for Winnipeg tonight. Hellebuyck is 6-3-0 this season with a .922 save percentage and a 2.34 goals-against, including a victory over the Kings.

Storyline Of The Day – Searching For Swagger At Home
How did we get here? It’s Election Day, almost a month into the regular season, and the LA Kings are one of only two teams in the NHL that are still looking for home win No. 1.

The chances to get two points in front of their fans have been there, none better than when they staged a late comeback on Thursday against Detroit by scoring twice in 6-on-5 play with their net empty to force overtime. But after a scoring play by Kevin Fiala in extra time was overturned due to goaltender interference, LA came up short in the shootout.

There was another overtime opportunity last month against Carolina, but the reality is that the Kings didn’t have a lead in either of those games that were decided past regulation. In fact, they have only led once in their five home games to this point, a 2-0 advantage they had against Pittsburgh before surrendering four consecutive goals to the Penguins, a team that has surprised everyone in the Metropolitan Division.

Memories of last season’s 31-6-4 home mark, a franchise record and the best home points percentage of any team in the NHL, seem distant. Is it possible for the 2025-26 version of the Kings to re-create that environment and get their home mojo back?

“What we don’t have is just that swagger,” said Head Coach Jim Hiller after practice on Monday. “I said to the guys, those last two games, and I can think of a few games that we’ve had this year that last year we never lost. If we out-played a team, we didn’t lose. We won a fair amount of games that we got out-played in, and usually the ones that were 50/50, we won. We had a pretty good home record.”

The tough part, at least in the most recent two games since returning from the road, is that the Kings have seemingly had the puck on their stick enough to generate chances and looks at the offensive net. On Thursday, 88 shot attempts produced three goals and were enough to earn a point against Detroit. Then Saturday, LA set a new season-high with 93 shot attempts, the most they’ve had in a game since December of 2023 and the most by any NHL team in a single game this season.

But despite all those looks, the ability to finish hasn’t been there. The first thing you can look at is the quality of the attempts they’re producing, where they’re coming from on the ice, and if the opponent is in a good position to defend them. The Devils managed to block 28 of those 93 attempts, while 44 ended up on goal, and goaltender Jacob Markstrom stopped all but one.

“It’s definitely frustrating,” defender Brandt Clarke said on Monday after practice. “We talked this morning and looked at all our offensive zone chances, and we’re like you know what, this is a lot of good stuff. There’s stuff that if we keep doing the right way, that’s how we’re going to win games and put up a lot of goals.”

While admitting that things aren’t going the way they’d like, Clarke seemed to be staying positive and reinforced the fact that those opportunities were there. If you’re looking for more swagger, Clarke is probably one of the first names you’d think of. It certainly seems that he came away from the video session understanding the message of where the team’s been good and where they need to improve. But it’s not as simple as just saying, ‘hey, we need to get to the front of the net more.’

“Usually, you’d say oh, that’s when you got to get working down low, get to the net, get a dirty one,” Clarke continued. “But there’s pucks that went through the crease, there’s pucks that hit the post, just bounced over guys’ sticks beside the net. When you only score once in that game and we had over 40 shots and a lot of grade-A’s, there’s a lot of good to take away as well, and in the grand scheme of things, if we can build off that and just take the positives, it’s going to do us well in the long run.”

The best news for the Kings is that they still have a long runway to straighten things out. Yes, they’ve played 13 games, but only five of them have come at home. Still 36 to go, including tonight, where they could gain a lot of momentum against a really good Jets team, one they’ve certainly contended well against previously.

“I think you just go back to where you’ve been at different times in your career, where you’ve been at different times as a team,” Hiller said. “You take a deep breath, and you just have to have trust and belief in yourself, in your teammates, and ultimately in the team. I think we’re really close, and I don’t think we’re far off, so we’re going to walk into the rink tonight with full confidence and get out there and play without overthinking anything.”

3 To Watch For –
– As mentioned above, Jim Hiller confirmed that we’ll see the changes to the lineup deployed tonight. Expect that to mean we’ll see more of Mikey Anderson, who didn’t quite crack 16 minutes of ice time in the first two games of the current homestand.

Not that anyone is concerned with Anderson’s offensive output, but he did net his only goal of the season thus far against the Jets the last time these teams faced off. While he’s a familiar partner for Drew Doughty to play with, the change is just as much about giving Anderson the minutes he’s deserved, which will help the team defensively against Winnipeg’s high-octane offense, which comes into tonight as the highest scoring club in the league on a per-game basis (3.75 goals per game).

The other side of the defensive change will have Brian Dumoulin paired alongside Cody Ceci. That’s how the Kings opened the season, and they didn’t get a long look before a change was made. Hiller elaborated on some of their thinking for the changes both then and now after yesterday’s practice.

“Dumoulin and Ceci were new to the team, and maybe we put them together a little bit too early to get them up and rolling,” Hiller said. “It always helps when the D partners talk to each other. ‘Hey, what were you thinking there?’ Or, ‘I was doing this, oh, we do this more,’ etc. And maybe they weren’t allowed to have that conversation as well, so we split them up and got them with a guy who’s been here for a while. Now we feel like they’ve been here long enough, and we’ve always liked Mikey and Drew together, so it’s just time to try that out again and see what we get for results.”

– Tonight’s matchup against Winnipeg represents the first time this season that the Kings will play an opponent for the second time. With that in mind, Hiller said he likes preparing for those games much more because he can look back at game tape from earlier this year, as opposed to leaning on previous seasons with different rosters and situations that have different variables.

“We always like that better, and for the prescout, it’s just so much better for the guys to watch themselves versus the team in the current year that you’ve just played. Now, they have the same advantage as we will, so it evens itself out, but it’s just a clearer prescout for everybody, and you can see exactly what they’re trying to do, where we excelled and where we didn’t.”

That familiarity also extends to multiple Jets forwards, with Alex Iafallo and Gabriel Vilardi, as the two remaining holdovers from the teams’ high-profile trade during the summer of 2023. Vilardi is coming in hot, riding a five-game point streak that includes four goals and four assists.

Adrian Kempe has had no issues producing points against Winnipeg, carrying a nine-game scoring streak into tonight’s contest against the Jets, which includes 14 points on eight goals and six assists and dates back to February of 2023.

– Lastly, a lot has been made of the impact Corey Perry has had since joining the lineup. Saturday’s regulation loss to New Jersey was the first game with Perry in the lineup that the Kings failed to earn a point, snapping a streak of six contests that saw them go 4-0-2. Individually, the 40-year-old has earned points in all but two of those games, scoring five goals and adding two assists.

Perry, who took reps on the team’s first power play unit during practice on Monday, looks like he’ll be in line for a bit of a larger role offensively when he skates in his 1,400th career NHL game Tuesday night. He’ll be the 44th skater in NHL history to reach that mark, and can catch Kings President and Hall of Famer Luc Robitaille (1,431) on the league’s all-time games played list later this season.

The Kings and Jets drop the puck at 7:30 tonight in Downtown Los Angeles. Thankfully, no parade traffic to worry about today as the Kings look to get the monkey off their back at home!