Column: Kings must get better, and fast, but there’s no quick fix

In an instant the Kings went from the tension of overtime to the end of their season, veering from the giddy notion that they could prevent the Ducks from winning the Pacific Division title to the realization that their next important decision will be when to schedule their tee times.

The Kings’ playoff hopes expired a week ago but the finality of an underachieving season hit them hard Sunday after their 4-3 overtime loss to the Ducks at Honda Center. While the Ducks prepare to face the Calgary Flames, the Kings will go through exit meetings with team executives and try to figure out where it all went wrong.

“It sucks. That’s one thing we talked about after the game. Brownie addressed it,” defenseman Drew Doughty said of forward Dustin Brown, whose leadership was still captain-like even though he was stripped of the “C” on his uniform.

“Remember this feeling and how crappy this feeling is,” Doughty said of Brown’s message. “This team that we just played, obviously they beat us tonight, but they’re going on to bigger and better things and we’re done and we’re going home to our hometowns or whatever. It sucks. I don’t want to be at home watching Stanley Cup playoffs without us in it, and yeah, it hurts.”

This will be a summer of change for the Kings. It must be, if they are to catch up in a swift league that has left them behind. Those changes must result in more scoring, more skill, more fire beyond the ever-competitive Doughty, goaltender Jonathan Quick and Brown.

Will those changes bring a new coach to replace Darryl Sutter, a coach more amenable to playing kids? Sutter scratched youngsters Jonny Brodzinski, Paul LaDue and Adrian Kempe on Sunday in a game that would have given them valuable experience. He inexplicably played Marian Gaborik, whose albatross of a contract is the only reason he wasn’t banished sooner.

“We certainly didn’t score as many goals as we wanted to,” said center Anze Kopitar, who said there was no injury to explain his drop-off from 25 goals last season to 12 this season. “I think each and every one of us has got to look himself in the mirror and figure out what went wrong and how can we improve on scoring goals and bring it next year.”

To Sutter, the problem was obvious.

“We didn’t score enough goals this year. I think we were 20 or 25 goals off our last two years,” he said of their decline from 225 last season to 205. “We just didn’t have enough in our lineup. You could see it in a lot of locations.”

The question is how that can change. Sutter didn’t really answer. “We lost a lot of goals out of our lineup last year. I think we added a bunch of kids in our lineup but they weren’t really looked on as goal scorers,” Sutter said, although Brodzinski had 25 goals in 56 minor league games and Kempe had 11 in 43 American Hockey League games. “There were a couple of guys that didn’t work out, that’s for sure.”

Missing the playoffs for the second time in three seasons also raises questions about the future of general manager Dean Lombardi, who rebuilt the organization into a two-time Stanley Cup champion but has since made a series of questionable decisions in his trade dealings and free-agent moves.

His acquisition of goaltender Ben Bishop when the Kings so badly needed scoring stands out as the wrong move at the wrong time, although adding Jarome Iginla as a rental player brought better results. Iginla, who will be 40 on July 1, had six goals and nine points in 19 games, including his 1,300th career point with an assist Sunday. He said he’s leaning toward coming back for another season, but the Kings might not be able to afford him because they’ll have to give raises to restricted free-agent forwards Tyler Toffoli and Tanner Pearson. Besides, they must get younger and faster. Iginla wouldn’t help there.

“I’m hoping to play again,” Iginla said, adding how much he enjoyed being in meaningful games. “It doesn’t feel like I want that to be the last one.”

It might have been the last one as Kings for some players, with an expansion draft looming and salary cap issues to face. Doughty acknowledged the sadness of losing teammates he considers brothers, but he knows staying the same will mean going backward.

“We didn’t lose this season at the last three weeks of the season. We lost it at the middle of the season when we weren’t good enough,” Doughty said. “We actually had a poor start to the season as well. A lot of fingers can be pointed.”

That will happen soon. In the meantime, the Kings will be golfing and the Ducks will be competing, though Doughty is dubious about the Ducks’ chances to go far. “I’m not going to say no,” he said, “but I think that there’s better teams in the Western Conference, for sure.”

The Kings weren’t one of those better teams. They’ll have a lot of time to think about that.

helene.elliott@latimes.com

Follow Helene Elliott on Twitter @helenenothelen