L.A. Kings trade Phillip Danault to Canadiens for second-round draft pick

The Los Angeles Kings traded veteran forward Phillip Danault to the Montreal Canadiens in exchange for a 2026 second-round pick, the teams announced Friday.

Danault, 32, was in the midst of a trying season with the Kings, with zero goals and just five assists in 30 games. He has been a key shutdown center for Los Angeles since it signed him as a free agent in 2021, but the last two years have seen the offensive side of his game completely dry up.

After a Kings debut season in which he had a career-high 27 goals and added 24 assists, Danault followed with 18 goals and a personal-best 54 points in 2022-23 and 17 goals and 47 points in 2023-24, mostly as the team’s second-line center during its run of four consecutive playoff appearances.

With Quinton Byfield grabbing the 2C role last season, Danault was pushed down to the third line while still taking on a lot of the tougher defensive matchups. He finished with only eight goals while adding 35 assists, but he did have a strong playoff series against the Edmonton Oilers last spring, with two goals and eight points in the six-game defeat.

This season has been among his most challenging. Danault is still strong on faceoffs — he’s at 52.9 percent this year and 52.8 percent over his career — and continues to win his five-on-five minutes. However, his ice time is down nearly 90 seconds on average, and his inability to provide depth offense is one contributor to the Kings sitting 31st in goal scoring.

Before a Dec. 6 home game against Chicago, Danault talked about his struggles this season and suggested “something needs to change” with his game. He had been doing extra drills with assistant coach Newell Brown after team skating sessions.

“Honestly, I’ve tried every tool I had from my 11 years in the NHL and that had worked in the past and it (hasn’t) worked this year,” Danault said. “And I’ve tried everything, whether it’s mental, (being) on the ice first, preparation, working on my 200 shots in practice. Doesn’t matter what I do now. It seems like I have to go through this. Yeah, that’s the way it is right now.

“The best thing I can do is keep working and keep my head up and doing the right thing, whether it’s practice or games and do the best I can for my team and like I’ve been doing my 11 years.”

Danault has 125 goals and 274 assists in 741 games with the Chicago Blackhawks, Canadiens and Kings. He has the remainder of this season and next on a six-year contract he signed with Los Angeles that has a $5.5 million average annual value. The contract also includes a modified 10-team no-trade clause, which it switched to before the 2024-25 season.

Kings general manager Ken Holland said the emergence of Quinton Byfield taking the second-line center role, the presence of young forward Alex Laferriere and the offseason additions of Joel Armia and Corey Perry all fed into a reduced role for Danault. Danault was averaging 16:19 of playing time but saw less than that in five of his seven games played, including only 10:27 in a Nov. 28 shootout loss to Anaheim.

“It’s been a bit of a struggle here offensively for Phil,” Holland said Friday night. “Found a trading partner here that I think is going to be good for Phil. He gets to go back to a city where he had a lot of success. We get a second-round pick and obviously some cap space to use going forward.”

Dealing with a bad case of the flu, Danault remained in Los Angeles while the Kings went 1-2 on a three-game road trip. But it was also clear that Holland was working on finding the center a new home — or his old home as it turned out.

Holland said he spoke with Danault and his agent, Allan Walsh, during the process this week.

“I know that they would be open for a move,” he said. “It was an opportunity for them to have maybe a different or a bigger, better role elsewhere. We made it happen tonight.”

Despite Danault’s numbers, there was significant interest in the veteran and Holland said he spoke with more than half of the teams in the league. “I think ideally, probably would like to have had a roster player,” Holland said, touching on the return he sought. “Centers are hard to find, obviously.”

For now, Holland said the vacancy will provide an opportunity for Turcotte and Samuel Helenius to play regularly, if not see increased minutes. But he also indicated that he’ll continue to search the market for help from outside and could look to make another move.

“That’s a possibility,” he said. “Laferriere can play in the middle too so gonna see how it goes. Obviously, we’ve played here the last four games without Phil. Went 1-1-2. Let’s see. Let’s watch. We got cap space. We got another draft pick. I’m gonna monitor here on a regular basis to see if I need to do something.”

We have acquired Columbus’ second-round pick in the 2026 NHL Draft from the Montreal Canadiens in exchange for forward Phillip Danault.

📲 https://t.co/8GTXTqL9ff#GoKingsGo | @enterprise pic.twitter.com/CSXJmOiEdT

— LA Kings (@LAKings) December 20, 2025

What it means for the Canadiens

The price makes this an absolute no-brainer for the Canadiens. Of course, taking on the full boat of his $5.5 million contract for the remainder of this season and next represents some degree of risk, but this provides the Canadiens essentially with a replacement for what they lost when Christian Dvorak left in free agency: a left-shot faceoff specialist who can kill penalties and play difficult minutes.

It also adds a needed veteran presence on the youngest team in the league.

The irony here is rich because when Danault left Montreal, then-Canadiens general manager Marc Bergevin believed $5.5 million was too much to pay to someone who ideally slotted in as a third-line center. In today’s cap world, however, that number works just fine for a third-line center. It will provide coach Martin St. Louis with the same lefty-righty bottom-six faceoff combo with Jake Evans that he had last season with Dvorak and Evans. And all it cost the Canadiens was a second-round pick they acquired in the Patrik Laine trade.

Again, there’s risk here, but it’s a total no-brainer for the Canadiens. — Arpon Basu

What it means for the Kings

On one hand, a second-round pick might have been the best the Kings could do for a player whose value has dropped as much as Danault’s has this season. Danault is now a 32-year-old center with zero goals this season, a player who might be on the decline and who appeared to be on the outs with the Kings.

On the other hand, this move does nothing for a Kings club that’s been in a low-scoring funk for basically the entire season. Their center depth, for now at least, is even thinner, and while offensive production from the middle has been almost nonexistent — Anže Kopitar and Byfield have just 10 goals between them as their top two pivots — Danault still gave them a solid, experienced defensive presence that handled many of their toughest matchup assignments over his four and a half seasons with the club.

The feeling was that the Kings needed to get a roster player back, and they don’t have that now as the holiday roster freeze goes into effect. Alex Turcotte, the No. 5 pick in the 2019 draft who has overcome injury issues early in his career, has been getting a look at the 3C spot while Danault was away from the club because of illness. Turcotte had nine goals and 25 points in 68 games last season while bouncing around the L.A. lineup. His ice time has fluctuated greatly during his time with the Kings. Maybe this higher role will be the chance he can seize.

However, this Kings team has been built to win now, and if they’re determined to become a factor in a jumbled Pacific Division and Western Conference playoff race, they may need to revisit the trade market and find some sort of upgrade. This doesn’t feel like an addition-by-subtraction move, and L.A. isn’t any better today than it was with an unproductive Danault in its lineup. — Eric Stephens