The NHL season turned three weeks old Friday, just hours after the Kings played on home ice for the first time.
“It’s definitely odd,” captain Anze Kopitar said Thursday, before the Kings played at Crypto.com Arena for the first time in 175 days to beat the San José Sharks 3-2 before a sold-out crowd of 18,146. “End of October. So a little different.”
The Kings were forced out of their building for the first seven games of the season by the third phase of a multimillion-dollar renovation of Crypto.com Arena, which turned 25 this month. If you count a preseason spent partly in Utah and Quebec, the trip lasted more than a month, making the Kings the last team in the league to play at home.