Six weeks after assessing his team’s end to the season and declaring he would need time to name his next head coach, Los Angeles Kings general manager Ken Holland landed on Peter Laviolette to break the team out of its stagnant position within the NHL hierarchy.Artemi Panarin might like the hire. Adrian Kempe and some of the Kings’ others top offensive players could give it a thumbs-up. Brandt Clarke might benefit the most. And, presumably, team president Luc Robitaille has given his approval to the general manager he hired a year ago.Beyond that, is there anyone else really digging Laviolette as the answer to the Kings’ continued inability to rise above their averageness? If anything, this move drives home their insistence that a full-blown roster rebuild is not the way to go. Holland wasn’t hired to set up L.A. to win in 2030. The hiring of a clear win-now type in Laviolette, who’ll have a three-year contract, is logical given their direction. But as initial excitement goes, it’s up there with a Monday morning drive in Southern California traffic.Last season, the Kings firmly planted stakes in the NHL’s mushy middle. Sure, they got in the playoffs again, but they banked 33 overtime-loss points, which helped them claim the second wild-card spot in a shallow Western Conference. But that only opened the Kings up to a four-game sweep by the Colorado Avalanche and the reality that they’re miles away from the league’s elite teams.The Kings were worse across the board than in 2024-25, a 105-point season ruined by a fourth straight first-round loss to the Edmonton Oilers. Now, Holland is bringing Laviolette to the rescue.Laviolette, 61, isn’t a particularly bad hire. He just isn’t a particularly inspiring one. He’ll no doubt be energized after spending last season away from the bench after getting his pink slip from the New York Rangers. He’s had a few of those — the Kings will be his seventh NHL team. But he also won at each of those six prior stops, and won big in many cases.Can a coach with 846 regular-season victories — seventh all-time and fourth-most among active coaches — win big with the Kings? For starters, Laviolette will need to get more out of their best players. Part of that will involve giving them more freedom, after they operated in a strict defense-first system that multiple previous Kings coaches emphasized. Responsible two-play is a noble endeavor but if you can’t score, what does that get you?The Kings plummeted to 29th in the league in scoring after being in the middle of the pack for three straight years. But they did perk up after interim coach D.J. Smith took over from Jim Hiller in March, when Smith had them playing more aggressively. Laviolette can lean further into that. Many will bring up New York crumbling under weighty expectations in his second season, but Laviolette coached the Rangers in a stellar 2023-24 campaign in which they won 55 games, captured the Presidents’ Trophy with 114 points and reached the Eastern Conference final.