Corey Perry Is Going Back to the Kings at 41 and Somehow Still Isn’t Done

Corey Perry just can’t quit this thing. The 41-year-old forward is signing another one-year deal with the Los Angeles Kings, marking his 22nd NHL season and his second straight stint with a team that traded him away midseason less than a year ago. According to Pierre LeBrun, the contract is done and Perry will be back in a Kings sweater when the 2026-27 season opens.

Perry started last year in Los Angeles before the Kings shipped him to Tampa Bay at the trade deadline. That was his second tour with the Lightning, and it ended the same way his first did — with an early playoff exit. Tampa got bounced in the first round by Montreal this time around.

There’s a lot of mileage on those legs. Perry has played 1,464 regular season games and another 244 in the playoffs. He’s got 465 goals and 507 assists in the regular season, plus 64 postseason goals. He also has 1,568 career penalty minutes, which tells you he didn’t get to 22 seasons by playing soft.

Perry’s Stanley Cup curse is kind of incredible

He won the Cup once, back in 2007 with Anaheim. That was nearly 20 years ago. Since then, he’s been on the wrong end of five different Stanley Cup Finals. And here’s the weird part — he lost with four different teams. Dallas in 2020, Montreal in 2021, Tampa Bay in 2022, and Edmonton in 2024 and 2025. That’s the kind of résumé that makes you wonder if he’s cursed or just really good at getting teams to the brink without finishing the job.

Perry was drafted 28th overall by the Mighty Ducks in the 2003 draft, which was so loaded it’s almost unfair. He made his debut in 2005-06 and became a core piece of that Anaheim team that won it all in ’07. He spent 14 years there before bouncing around to Dallas, Montreal, Chicago, Edmonton, Tampa, and now back to L.A.

A familiar face in a familiar place

The Kings clearly see something in Perry even at this stage. He’s not the 40-goal scorer he was in his prime, but he’s still a pain to play against. He knows how to get under opponents’ skin and he’s not afraid to stand in front of the net on the power play. For a team that’s trying to stay competitive in the Pacific Division, having a guy like Perry around for one more year at a low cost makes sense.

It also means Los Angeles will be his fourth team in three seasons. But at this point, Perry seems to treat team changes like most people treat swapping out a worn pair of shoes. He just finds another pair and keeps walking.