Drew Doughty scores in the final second of regulation to win it for the Kings.

Per NHL.com:

What has been rumored almost from the time the Los Angeles Kings dismissed Terry Murray as coach on Dec. 12 became official Tuesday when the team announced Darryl Sutter will take over behind the bench.

Sutter will begin his head coaching duties with the Kings when they take the ice for practice on Wednesday morning. A press conference will be held at 1 p.m. Pacific Time. Sutter’s first game as coach will be Thursday night at home against the Anaheim Ducks.

Interim coach John Stevens led the Kings to a 2-2-0 record, including a 3-2 shootout win over the Toronto Maple Leafs on Monday. Rich Hammond of LA Kings Insider reporter earlier this week that Stevens will be kept on as an assistant at least through the end of the season, and that Sutter has been in touch with management to get scouting reports on the Kings’ personnel.

Sutter has spent 11 seasons as an NHL coach with Chicago, San Jose and most recently in Calgary. He also served as the general manager of the Flames until he resigned in Dec. 28, 2010. He is 409-320-101-30 in 860 games as an NHL coach and led the Flames to the 2004 Stanley Cup Final, in which they lost to Tampa Bay in seven games.

Sutter’s teams have qualified for the playoffs in 10 of his 11 seasons.

The Kings lost to San Jose in the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs last season, but general manager Dean Lombardi traded for Mike Richards and signed Simon Gagne during the summer and expectations increased in Los Angeles. A slow start to the season has been compounded by the team’s inability to score despite the offensive upgrades — the Kings are last in the NHL with an average of 2.12 goals per game.

Lombardi fired Murray after a four-game losing streak dropped the Kings to 13-13-4 and 12th place in the Western Conference.

Per NHL.com:

An anemic offense that showed no signs of improvement and a failure to live up to expectations were enough to cost Los Angeles Kings coach Terry Murray his job.

Kings General Manager Dean Lombardi announced Murray’s firing Monday afternoon. Assistant coach John Stevens will take over in the interim until a replacement is found.

“There’s no timeline right now,” Lombardi said. “We are looking at all our options.”

Murray is the fifth coach to be fired this season after Bruce Boudreau, Randy Carlyle, Paul Maurice and Davis Payne.

Lombardi declined to comment when asked about his interest in Darryl Sutter, whom Lombardi has praised in the past, but said “it’s a very short list” of candidates.

The move was made after Murphy ran practice in Boston Monday. The Kings are in Boston to begin a four-game road trip Tuesday.

Stevens, who spent 2006-09 as coach of the Philadelphia Flyers — Murray was an assistant to Stevens during part of that tenure — will be charged with generating some offense from a team that was supposed to improve its 5-on-5 scoring with the offseason additions of Mike Richards and Simon Gagne.

Instead, the Kings are 30th in the NHL at 2.21 goals per game. While Richards and Gagne have contributed, key offensive pieces — Justin Williams, Dustin Brown, Dustin Penner and Drew Doughty — have underperformed.

Lombardi said there wasn’t a last straw, although last Saturday’s game would be a good example of what ailed the team. The Kings were held to two goals or fewer for the eighth straight game in a 2-1 loss to Dallas, and were beaten for the second straight game by a goalie making his first NHL start.

After that game, Murray called out the team for a lack of desperation.

When asked if the team needed a different voice in the room, Lombardi said, “In the end, it still comes down to the player getting his focus and being the best he can be. With young players today, this is a challenge. But I don’t think it’s just the young players. I think it’s been right across the board.”

Lombardi acknowledged that expectations around the team placed an emphasis on results. The organization has billboards around the city stating that “The Time Is Now.”

Many outlets had pegged the Kings as a top-four team in the Western Conference, including Sports Illustrated and The Hockey News.

“This team came in with a very high level of expectations,” Lombardi said. “And that puts a different perspective on your room and the young players. It’s unique here in that you’re counting on these young players. But the established players have to step up here.

“This year the expectations were higher, so it gets dicier.”

Lombardi hired Murray in 2008 primarily because of the coach’s structured defensive system. But there was a growing sense that that system was fine for young players, but not for a team ready to take the next step, such as L.A.

Lombardi said it obviously wasn’t pleasant informing Murray, who coached his 1,000th career game earlier this season, of his decision.

“I don’t think words can ever describe how hard something like this is,” Lombardi said. “You’re talking about, first off, a really good man. He really stabilized this franchise, pointed it in the right direction. He taught these players a lot. When they look back, they’re going to realize they learned a lot from him.

“This is one of the hardest-working coaches that I’ve ever been exposed to in terms of his commitment to the game and always searching for ways to get better.”

Anze Kopitar quarterbacks this goal, with a loft pass over the St. Louis defense and onto the stick of Simon Gagne.

Per NHL.com:

The Los Angeles Kings announced Thursday night that they have reached verbal agreement on a multiyear contract with restricted free-agent defenseman Drew Doughty. The Kings say it’s an eight-year deal; TSN is reporting that worth an average of $7 million per season.

The 21-year-old had 11 goals and 40 points last season, a comedown from 2009-10 when he finished with 16 goals and 59 points, was a finalist for the Norris Trophy as the NHL’s top defensemen as well as a second-team All-Star and an Olympic gold medal winner with Team Canada.

“He’s a special kid and he’s a good kid,” team governor Tim Leiweke told Kings Insider.. “These things are never easy, and sometimes people take them personally, but I think he’s going to be fine. I guarantee you we’re fine. I’m happy that we got it done.”

Doughty will have a week to get into game shape before the Kings open their season next Friday against the New York Rangers in Stockholm, Sweden. The Kings play Friday night at home against Anaheim and Saturday in Las Vegas against Colorado before leaving for Europe.

Leiweke said the signing indicated the franchise’s commitment to winning — the Kings have not won a Stanley Cup since entering the NHL in 1967.

“We are sending a very strong message to our fans. We’re committed to winning, and we just proved it again.” he said.

“When you look at the commitments that we made this summer, when you add this to Mike Richards and his long-term deal, and Jack Johnson and the commitment we tied up there, and then going out and adding Simon Gagne, we spent more money this summer than in the history of this franchise. We always said, if we get close, we will come with our guns blazing, and we just blazed. I’m glad it’s done. I want our fans to understand that now, this is all about creating an environment to win the Cup, and that’s what Drew is going to help us do. We don’t look back. We only look forward now, and eight years is a good forward.”

Kings coach Terry Murray was delighted to have his top defenseman back.

“I’m real happy for Drew Doughty and I’m real happy for the team, all the players in the locker room,” he told Kings Insider. “There’s no question that with him coming back in, there’s just going to be a real good feeling in the locker room.”

Murray said he’s hopeful Doughty will be able to make the trip to Las Vegas and skate beforehand with some of the players who won’t be dressing that night, then get him some practice time in Europe before the opener.

Doughty, who turns 22 on Dec. 8, statistically already ranks among the best defensemen to ever play for the Kings. His nine career game-winning goals ranks fourth all-time among Kings defensemen and his 17 career power-play goals ranks ninth all-time. He’s also 12th on the Kings all-time list in career goals (33), 13th in career assists (93) and points (126), and tied for 15th on the all-time list in career plus/minus rating (plus-16).

Doughty led the Kings and finished fifth in the NHL last season in ice time with an average of 25:38 per game. He led all Kings defensemen with 11 goals (eighth overall on the team) and his 29 assists tied for fourth overall on the team. He also finished fourth overall on the team in both plus/minus (plus-13) and blocked shots (101).  Doughty finished the 2010-11 season with 11 multi-point games — the Kings were 9-2-0 in those games — and he logged 25 minutes or more of ice time in 41 of the 76 regular-season games he played in.

The Kings selected Doughty with the second selection in the first round of the 2008 Entry Draft.  He has 33 goals and 126 points along with 178 penalty minutes in 239 career regular-season games with the Kings.  In 12 career postseason games, Doughty has 5 goals and 11 points, with 12 penalty minutes.

Per NHL.com:

Veteran forward Ethan Moreau has signed a one-year contract with the Los Angeles Kings worth $600,000, according to Rich Hammond of LA Kings Insider.

Moreau played 37 games for Columbus last season, collecting 1 goal and 5 assists for the Blue Jackets. He had spent parts of 11 seasons with Edmonton prior to joining Columbus, and he was named captain of the Oilers in October 2007.

His best season with Edmonton came in 2003-04, when he set career highs in goals (20) and points (32). Moreau has 146 goals and 283 points in 900 career NHL games.

Moreau was a first-round pick in the 1994 Entry Draft by Chicago, and the Blackhawks dealt him to Edmonton in a seven-player trade in March 1999. He was awarded the King Clancy Memorial Trophy in 2009 for his work in the Edmonton community.

Per NHL.com:

The Los Angeles Kings, one of the runners-up in the race to sign Brad Richards, wasted no time turning to Plan B by signing veteran forward Simon Gagne on Saturday.

Kings Insider on the team’s website says it’s a two-year, $7 million deal that will pay Gagne $4.5 million in 2011-12 season and $2.5 million in 2012-13 for a $3.5 million each season. Gagne has been cleared to play — he missed time last season with a sore neck but returned in the playoffs — so the signing is not contingent on him passing a physical.

Gagne, 31, spent 10 seasons with Philadelphia before being traded to Tampa Bay last summer. He had 17 goals and 40 points in 63 regular-season games, then contributed 5 goals and 12 points in the playoffs, helping the Lightning advance to Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals before losing to Boston.

The native of Saint-Foy, Que., has 276 goals and 564 points in 727 regular-season games, as well as 37 goals and 59 points in 105 Stanley Cup Playoff games. He had back-to-back 40-goal seasons for the Flyers in 2005-06 and ’06-07, and put up 34 goals as recently as 2008-09, one year after missing most of the season with concussion-related problems.

Per NHL.com:

When Ryan Smyth was traded from the Edmonton Oilers to the New York Islanders in 2007, he tearfully said that if he won the Stanley Cup with New York that spring he would bring it back to Edmonton.

Smyth didn’t win the Cup that spring, but now the Banff, Alberta native may get another chance.

The Oilers announced Sunday that they had re-acquired Smyth from the Los Angeles Kings, to whom he had been traded in 2009. At the time Smyth was playing for Colorado, who had signed him to a five-year $31.2 million contract in the summer of 2007.

The Kings received forward Colin Fraser and a seventh-round pick in the 2012 NHL Entry Draft in exchange for Smyth.

Smyth, 35, scored 23 goals and added 24 assists in 82 games for the Kings last season. In his career he has scored 335 goals and tallied 405 assists. Prior to his trade to New York in 2007, Smyth had played parts of 12 seasons for Edmonton, during which he had scored 549 points in 770 games for the Oil.

He is currently entering the final year of his contract.