Penguins' Tommy Novak Scores Twice Early, and the Kings Never Catch Up

Pittsburgh's 5-2 win ended its four-game losing streak and dropped the Kings to 5-8-2 midway through a homestand.

The Pittsburgh Penguins beat the Kings Saturday night at Crypto.com Arena. Tommy Novak had them up two goals before the game was six minutes old.

That's a regulation loss, so the Kings fall to 5-8-2 and stay at 12 points. Pittsburgh, which came to town on its second four-game losing streak of the season, according to the Penguins fan site PensBurgh, moves to 6-9-2.

Novak's first goal came at 1:52, set up by Declan Carlile and Kris Letang. His second came at 5:10 off a feed from Ben Kindel, according to the scoring summary on LA Kings Insider, the club's own site. Corey Perry got one back at 9:55, with Mikey Anderson and Artemi Panarin assisting.

Then the penalty kill had its usual kind of night. PensBurgh noted the Kings came in ranked last in the NHL at 62.2 percent, against a Pittsburgh power play that had scored on just 16 percent of its chances during a 2-7-1 slide. Egor Chinakhov scored on the man advantage anyway, with 29 seconds left in the first period, to make it 3-1, according to the LA Kings Insider scoring summary.

The Kings' power play answered early in the second. Alex Laferriere scored at 3:07, set up by Adrian Kempe and Erik Gustafsson, to cut it to 3-2, the LA Kings Insider summary shows. Sidney Crosby restored the two-goal cushion at 17:13 on a play started by Evgeni Malkin and Erik Karlsson.

The shot counter tells you what kind of night it was. The LA Kings Insider live thread had the Kings still down 4-2. The Penguins added a fifth goal after that, according to the LA Kings Insider final.

It was a sharp turn from Wednesday, when the Kings beat San Jose 7-2 in what LA Kings Insider called their most convincing win of the season. They had scored 15 goals in the first three games of the homestand and came into Saturday 2-1-0 on it. Alex Turcotte was back in the lineup after missing 11 games.

It was also the Kings' annual Hockey Fights Cancer night. Darcy Kuemper, listed in net in the club's posted lineup, had a specially designed mask for the occasion, and the Kings Care Foundation planned to auction it off after the game, according to LA Kings Insider. Thanks to Novak, his first five minutes in it were rough.

Pittsburgh doesn't get much time to celebrate. Its next game starts less than 24 hours after puck drop, in Anaheim on Sunday, PensBurgh noted. The Kings stay home for three games next week, and LA Kings Insider wrote Saturday morning that Kevin Fiala looked to be trending closer to a return. A team that keeps outshooting opponents and losing could use the help.

Source: pensburgh.com, retrieved November 8, 2026. Other sources: lakingsinsider.com, lakingsinsider.com (2).