Holland disappointed by Kings' season, but focused on retooling

“We had made the playoffs 25 years in a row, and then there was this push for rebuild, rebuild, rebuild, rebuild,” he said. “And I said at that press conference, when you head into rebuild modes, it’s eight to 10 years till you come out on the other side, with no guarantees. I would say to you, we have lots of good players. I gotta build a better team.”

Holland’s first order of business this offseason is to hire a permanent head coach after firing Jim Hiller on March 1 and making D.J. Smith the interim head coach. He said that he aims to interview five to eight candidates with a range of head coaching experience levels, and that Smith will be one of those candidates.

The Kings produced a better record with Smith in charge than Hiller, but Holland was defiant at the idea that he could have produced a better season result had he dismissed Hiller sooner.

“I don’t really regret any decisions I’ve ever made as a manager,” he said. “I’ve got more information today than I had a year ago on some things. But there’ll be information I got today that I did’'t have at the time. So you take the information at the time, at the moment, and then you make your decisions, and then you don’t look back. At the end of the day, I don’t think any manager in this league’s ever been batting 100% on decisions … you’re going to make some decisions that don’t work, but certainly I have no regrets. Felt good about Jim Hiller taking over the year after 105 points last year … but the team was playing at an inconsistent level, and kept waiting for it to kind of find its footing, and it didn’t.”

It’s clear that Holland will be focused on retooling the Kings rather than overhauling them, a task made tougher by Anze Kopitar’s retirement and a free agent class viewed around the NHL as relatively weak. He’ll have to lean on current Kings players and improvements on the margins.

“I think there’s lots of pieces here, and I speak to, again, there’s three teams over this year that were — from a points standpoint — way ahead of the other 13 [in the Western Conference],” he said. “We gotta continue to push and grind to make our team better, to make our team a little bit deeper, and to keep at it.”

Other Notes

• Holland stated that he expects Quinton Byfield to serve as the team’s number-one center and the center on the top power-play unit next season.
• The Kings will pick 17th overall at this year’s draft, and hold two second-round picks as well. Holland said that he expects to use all of those picks and wouldn’t trade them unless he was blown away by an offer.