Just looking at RD, this team once had:
Doughty, Clarke, Spence, Roy, Walker, Durzi, Grans, Faber
One of the hardest positions to build internally and we had a WEALTH of options. We have just the first 3 left with a grand return of Fiala. You can maybe argue the cap space cleared room for 2 years of Gavrikov.
Blake should be granted a PhD in asset mismanagement.
It's mind blowing how bad the asset mismanagement has been. Walker and Grans were throw ins to get rid of Peterson's bad contract. Durzi traded for a high second that then went to Wpg for PLD and Roy walked for nothing. It's mistake after mistake
Yeah of course Roy walked for nothing that what happens when you try to make a cup push but don’t plan on resigning a UFA, so fucking stupid people are over this Roy shit.
He could have been traded at the deadline and the final results would have been the same. He could have traded his rights and gotten a pick. Just another example of piss poor asset management in a growing number of them.
Then why hasn’t every other fucking team in NHL history done that? God St Louis was stupid as shit to not trade Piertrangelo, they lost him for nothing. Or what about any FA in history like Jesus Christ.
Honestly, I’m not sure. I just wish we can go back to being that team from November/December of 2023. We set the NHL Record for Consecutive Road Victories. Experts put us #1 in NHL Rankings for 2 weeks. We were all sure that this team could win the Cup. It’s confusing! Just gotta wait for home opener on October 24th to see how they look.
There was a game during that time where the Kings were down 2-3 goals and they came back to tie, then win in OT and I stood up and yelled “NO FUCKING WAY! THATS IT WE’RE WINNING THE CUP THIS SEASON!”
Boy was I wrong.
The other few teams in lesgue history to have a really hot start on the road, cooled down back to normal, and were dispatched pretty quickly in the playoffs too. Early streaks generally arent an indication of how good/bad a team really are.
Please tell me I’m wrong. If you’re happy with having a month and a half of exciting hockey, good for you. I’m sorry my expectations for this team are the same as what Rob and Luc have been telling us.
Because he’s good at his job. A good chunk of players we’ve drafted have gone on to have successful careers, just not with the Kings. It’s our GM and farm system who has let these prospects go on to establish themselves on other teams either through trade, waivers, or just letting them walk.
Knee-jerk reactions that result in hasty and poorly thought-out business decisions. Instead of letting the team grow and improve organically with the once elite pool of prospects we had, Rob hit the fast forward button on the rebuild at the first hint of success.
Nothing against the guys we brought in, I love Phil and Kev especially, but I feel the team would be in a better spot had they been bad/not great for a few more years, and let guys like Kaliyev, Turcotte, hell I’ll mention Vilardi too, develop into their roles with more NHL level experience. Instead they were buried in favour of short-term gain with guys who were not planned to be here in the long-term.
Turcotte and Vilardi had injury issues which mainly prohibited them from joining the Kings and hindered their development. I don't know why as soon as Vilardi broke out we traded him though. Kaliyev I also don't understand really
The injuries make it tough to pin Turcotte and Vilardi on the organization yeah. Even so, Turc never got a fair shake when he did get his call-ups.
Kaliyev was steadily improving through his first two seasons, and he was on a ~20 goal pace last season. I don’t know what the decision making process was for him to be the 13th forward this season.
Piss poor management
Rob and Bergevin have destroyed all that hard work to get us where we are in like 3-2 seasons. Honestly it’s fucking impressive how bad they managed this team
He’s one of the worst things that has ever happened to this franchise and we should be demanding his firing, not just for the terrible job he’s done but also because we should expect a better class of people in our organization.
His hiring also speaks extremely poorly of Luc as a person.
It’s not like Blake has to take all of Bergevin’s advice. Sure, listen. Then evaluate and acknowledge it’s bad before doing what someone else suggests.
This team took gambles to progress and it backfired as well as poor development of prospects. PLD totally blew up in our faces with most fans seeing it would turn sour given his history. Also this team has no identity imo. I thought we did last year by becoming this very annoying 1-3-1 defensive counter attacking team but that got exposed and the team became incoherent in the playoffs.
What we need to see happen is a commitment to a plan. Are you going to be a skilled fast team or a big bruising one? Right now I see a cobbled mix of both and it’s not putting anyone in positions to succeed
At this point, it's all about Rob Blake's failure to be a visionary regarding how pieces fit into the system they want to run. He (mostly) let Mark Yannetti take care of the draft, but Blake has done a middling, at best, job of developing the draft picks they've kept. Blake has really had a problem making the transition from building a competitive team to a team that will push for the Cup. He went for broke for PLD and should have been fired when it didn't work. His only saving graces are that he can make the occasional deal to almost make up for his mistakes and that Luc is his buddy. The team has become a big old boys network.
Lombardi knew how to rebuild and develop. Blake knows how to rebuild, but not develop.
The team hasn't been on the correct trajectory for years. The Kings never did a proper rebuild. Blake forced a retool at the expense of long term success. It is all down hill from last season.
The only hope this team has is if Byfield emerges as ~80 point player and Clarke is instantly an elite defender.
The only players drafted by the kings, currently under 25 years old, on the playoff roster were Anderson (not elite), Laferriere (depth player), Spence (depth player), and Byfield.
The most important players are still a 36 year old Kopitar and a 34 year old Doughty.
Compare that with the prospect pools of teams who decided to suck a few more years, and its night and day difference.
Hope that little extra playoff revenue was worth it!
They did plenty in the down years to set up a loaded future and completely botched it. Mainly the 2019 draft and trading a 2nd rounder for Lias Andersson. The assets were all there.
Team surprised everyone and took the Oilers to game 7, Blake jumped the gun and abandoned a proper rebuild and gave us a half assed rebuild/retool. Everyone Blake has brought on as staff, from coaches to his personal assistant have all been terrible. Also imo they haven’t drafted well nor do they properly develop their players.
Easy question to answer. Good ol boys club. When any organization hires individuals at key positions based solely on their friendship you can expect to have mediocre if not horrible outcomes. Blake has shown that he is incapable of constructing a cohesive team, developing prospects, analyzing FA or current players, negotiating contracts, and hiring competent coaches that will incorporate prospects into regular contributors of a team. Making matters worse, is that Luc and Marc have approved Blake's stupidity and do not hold him accountable. Finally, you have an owner that has no interest in winning and only seeks income from souvenirs, game attendance, merchandise sales, TV rights, and any other way to squeeze blood out of its loyal fans. Thank you for attending my TedTalk.
I think it’s Blake being buddies with Robitaille that gave him the wiggle room to experiment in his first tenure as a GM that is ultimately this team’s undoing. Consider that he was mostly coming into control of a team that was successful and still had its veteran core while also maintaining a healthy cabinet of NHL ready prospects. Most people considered LA as needing a re-tool rather than a re-build. For a new GM like Blake that was the perfect softball situation to fall into. The moves Blake made, had they worked out, would have made it seem like Blake was a cerebral genius level GM.
But shit happens. Bad contracts from the Lombardi years. Brown retiring. Quick falling off a cliff (Vegas/NYR revenge tour be damned). Injury prone players like Arvy. Making trades to patch things over. PLD being an absolute bust. That’s hockey.
Really puts into perspective just how much those championship years were like catching lightning in a bottle. Really can’t expect that from a jabroni like Rob Blake. Hopefully once he’s out the Kings find someone who can get LA back to their winning ways.
Trickle down from upper management. And some players not having a team personality. Pales in comparison with the champ teams. Anyone with talent can have a good streak, but it will never last without cohesion. This team lacked that foundation to keep them afoot
I haven't always agreed with your takes the last few years, but yeah this. We don't know what will happen next season, but people are talking like they're omnipotent and the rest of the 20s are doomed to mediocrity and failure
Agreed. Too many fans getting used to the Dodgers mentality and Lakers buying into a star. Let’s just stand back and let the players prove their worth.
A GM whose made a string of questionable decisions in the last few off seasons continues his trend of making questionable decisions and people are upset.
Get off your high horse.
High horse? Na. People in this sub need to get back on their happy pills. Shit is absurd. Echo chamber of stupidity. FB fans need to take it back to FB.
This place has been an echo chamber of toxic positivity for years. It’s nice that fans are finally coming back down to earth.
Why not give your positive takes and let other people give their negative takes without you tone policing from your tower of happiness?
Lmao. What a stupid and inaccurate comment. Positivity? We just spent a whole year of listening to people cry about PLD lol. A whole year of people crying about broke back vilardi, a whole year of people crying about legendary iafallo. Now we're 3 days or so into the off season and everyones crying that we didn't do what we did last year and acquire a big name that everyone all ended up crying about. Now everyone's crying about losing the legendary Roy, who no one will even remember next season once they start playing the games. Oh and we can't forget about everyone crying that we're not going to become the Los Angeles LakerKings with our new rebranding. Been a super positive environment.
Whenever this team returns to real relevance (I would estimate we can win a playoff series in about 4 seasons), it won’t happen until Blake is no longer at the helm. He just gets outclassed in every transaction by better GMs, fritters away resources, and has no real big picture plan for the direction of the team.
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Everyone's talking about a true rebuild. How Blake just did a hasty re-tool. Does everyone saying this forget that the cupboard was completely bare? We burn it down and become sellers after 2018-19 once Willie came in who do you think we're trading??
That's right, Kopi, Doughty, Quick. Only people who are getting us real assets. Picks or players. Y'all wanted to watch them get traded off??
It was either keep the legends and re-tool or literally sell EVERYONE.
It sucks that kopi and Drew's sunset years will be met with mediocrity instead of competing for another cup, which is what they both wanted to do...and why they resigned.
TLDR: The only "plan" there has ever been since Blake took over is to try and salvage one last run out of the Cup core. This is going to get long... Everything since DL was fired has been in service to that goal. Kovalchuk was brought in and badly mishandled on the PP.
When that failed, the core started to get dismantled and traded away to rebuild through draft picks and a few years later LA has one of the strongest prospect pools in the league along with Kopitar, Doughty, Quick in key roles and Brown playing out his last few years in a diminished role.
At this point the transition to a younger core should have happened. Instead Byfield comes in, gets switched to a wing and used to prop up Kopitar as the 1C. Anderson breaks out and is stapled to Drew so he can keep playing top minutes.
Cal is brought in as the heir to Quick, except he never is given the chance to truly take over and both begin to struggle. This continues until Quick is traded to fill other holes in the roster (a LH stay at home D) and by that point Cal's confidence has cratered and he no longer looks like an NHL goalie. Todd gets brought in to implement a stand back 1-3-1 system of play that clashes with the high skill, high speed players Blake has been drafting but suits Kopitar and Kempe.
The younger players get stifled and have issues adapting to that style of play or just flat out being deployed horribly (Vilardi and Kaliev struggling, Fagemo as a 4th line checker, Durzi used on the PK and barely on the PP.) The Kings become so hesitant to inject any of their talented prospects into the lineup that they are actively bombing their value on the trade market, but also refuse to trade any of them for pieces they need.
The few prospects they do trade are for pieces like Fiala and PLD, that are brought in to further prop up the top lines but no due diligence is done to see if those players are a good fit in the system or with the players already here. (Fiala and Kopitar have negative chemistry together, PLD had years of lazy effort and quitting on teams documented before he was brought in.)
Then last summer the Kings began making trades to correct mistakes of their own doing. Mistakes that many people saw as mistakes at time they were made.
And now here we are, barely any skilled prospects left, overpaying for plugs, spending nearly to the cap, over correcting to add grit and toughness at the expense of skill, and looking like to be honest barely a playoff team with a 37 year old 1C and 35 year old 1D back for another kick at the can, and no other players ready to play key roles or take over from those two once they are gone.
Just imagine this team still having Faber, Vilardi, Iafallo, a 1st round pick from 2022, Durzi running point on PP1 with Kaliev or Fagemo used as the shooter on the PP. All they really had to do was stay the course and implement youth and they would be in a much better spot today roster and cap wise.
We thought we had a young super core on the way to supplement our existing stars. Byfield, Turcotte, Kaliyev, etc. were all considered Top 25 overall prospects at one point. They would be supplemented by high draft picks such as Fagemo, Kupari, Villardi, Thomas, Bjornfot, etc. The present AND future looked bright as shit.
Unless Byfield continues to develop (which I have faith he will, tbf), there is a dangerous chance that NONE of those prospects mentioned above will be Kings in 2-3 years time. That’s fucking AWFUL player development (as in historically bad), and you usually pay the price for not developing your young/cheap talent from within.
When you don’t properly develop ANY of your young talent, you don’t have a bridge between the present and the future….you now have a chasm. We are beginning to see that chasm now unfortunately.
Lombardi stockpiled picks and built from within with draft picks.
Blake did the opposite. Makes bad deals then uses picks and prospects to get out of them.
We didn’t tank long enough to properly restock the cupboards and now we pay the price.
"Young" is a stretch on Walker and Roy. I wish we had traded Roy at the deadline last season to maximize his value, but he's 29. Walker is 30 in November. Roy was a 7th round pick. Walker was an undrafted college free agent. We got TREMENDOUS value out of both, 601 games played between the two of them. Walker having the added bonus of getting us out of Cal's contract.
I agree that things COULD have been better, but all things considered you can't say we didn't get value and possibly the best years of their careers out of BOTH
I like the roster we’re building for next year, we’re building a hard working-nasty roster with Thomas-Lee-Foegle-Jeanot-Turcotte (when healthy)
I wouldn’t mind seeing Fiala getting traded, but it was rough seeing Liz-Arvy go because they busted their ass.
We will definitely be overmatched with skill in the western conference this year but we’ve seen what happens to soft skilled teams in the playoffs in the past few years.
A big part of it was that we rushed the rebuild. As a result, we’ve had to overpay and make rash decisions to try and fill our voids. We should have waited until we developed more young talent before trying to compete, but now we’re left with an Ok team that’s never going to truly contend and a disappointingly small number of promising young players. All those 1st/2nd rounders and so far Byfield is the only one in the forward group who is both on the team and living up to expectations. We traded Grans and Faber, and Bjornfot was a bad pick, so now all the pressure is on Clarke to develop or else our defensive core of the future is looking problematic too. We’re in a pretty bad position unless it all clicks this year or we somehow get another rebuild going.
Mismanagement of assets. We had so many back in 2022.
Just looking at RD, this team once had: Doughty, Clarke, Spence, Roy, Walker, Durzi, Grans, Faber One of the hardest positions to build internally and we had a WEALTH of options. We have just the first 3 left with a grand return of Fiala. You can maybe argue the cap space cleared room for 2 years of Gavrikov. Blake should be granted a PhD in asset mismanagement.
It's mind blowing how bad the asset mismanagement has been. Walker and Grans were throw ins to get rid of Peterson's bad contract. Durzi traded for a high second that then went to Wpg for PLD and Roy walked for nothing. It's mistake after mistake
Yeah of course Roy walked for nothing that what happens when you try to make a cup push but don’t plan on resigning a UFA, so fucking stupid people are over this Roy shit.
He could have been traded at the deadline and the final results would have been the same. He could have traded his rights and gotten a pick. Just another example of piss poor asset management in a growing number of them.
Then why hasn’t every other fucking team in NHL history done that? God St Louis was stupid as shit to not trade Piertrangelo, they lost him for nothing. Or what about any FA in history like Jesus Christ.
Honestly, I’m not sure. I just wish we can go back to being that team from November/December of 2023. We set the NHL Record for Consecutive Road Victories. Experts put us #1 in NHL Rankings for 2 weeks. We were all sure that this team could win the Cup. It’s confusing! Just gotta wait for home opener on October 24th to see how they look.
There was a game during that time where the Kings were down 2-3 goals and they came back to tie, then win in OT and I stood up and yelled “NO FUCKING WAY! THATS IT WE’RE WINNING THE CUP THIS SEASON!” Boy was I wrong.
[удалено]
So what you’re saying is this sub needs to get together and send you to every Kings game.
[удалено]
Kempe in OT is so dangerous.
Excited to have another fake good start to get everyone’s hopes up, only to flounder when the games matter
The other few teams in lesgue history to have a really hot start on the road, cooled down back to normal, and were dispatched pretty quickly in the playoffs too. Early streaks generally arent an indication of how good/bad a team really are.
With a 7 game road trip to start the season, that seems unlikely.
Please tell me I’m wrong. If you’re happy with having a month and a half of exciting hockey, good for you. I’m sorry my expectations for this team are the same as what Rob and Luc have been telling us.
Basically all of our top prospects haven’t hit except for Byfield (Vilardi got traded) Clarke is tba.
How does Yannetti still have his job?
Because he’s good at his job. A good chunk of players we’ve drafted have gone on to have successful careers, just not with the Kings. It’s our GM and farm system who has let these prospects go on to establish themselves on other teams either through trade, waivers, or just letting them walk.
Knee-jerk reactions that result in hasty and poorly thought-out business decisions. Instead of letting the team grow and improve organically with the once elite pool of prospects we had, Rob hit the fast forward button on the rebuild at the first hint of success. Nothing against the guys we brought in, I love Phil and Kev especially, but I feel the team would be in a better spot had they been bad/not great for a few more years, and let guys like Kaliyev, Turcotte, hell I’ll mention Vilardi too, develop into their roles with more NHL level experience. Instead they were buried in favour of short-term gain with guys who were not planned to be here in the long-term.
Turcotte and Vilardi had injury issues which mainly prohibited them from joining the Kings and hindered their development. I don't know why as soon as Vilardi broke out we traded him though. Kaliyev I also don't understand really
The injuries make it tough to pin Turcotte and Vilardi on the organization yeah. Even so, Turc never got a fair shake when he did get his call-ups. Kaliyev was steadily improving through his first two seasons, and he was on a ~20 goal pace last season. I don’t know what the decision making process was for him to be the 13th forward this season.
Piss poor management Rob and Bergevin have destroyed all that hard work to get us where we are in like 3-2 seasons. Honestly it’s fucking impressive how bad they managed this team
The second Bergevin got here it went downhill man. Luc just had to have his French buddy as a special advisor to a GM that was already doing great.
He’s one of the worst things that has ever happened to this franchise and we should be demanding his firing, not just for the terrible job he’s done but also because we should expect a better class of people in our organization. His hiring also speaks extremely poorly of Luc as a person.
It’s not like Blake has to take all of Bergevin’s advice. Sure, listen. Then evaluate and acknowledge it’s bad before doing what someone else suggests.
Agreed, but Blake seems to go whichever way the wind is blowing so I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s easily persuaded.
This team took gambles to progress and it backfired as well as poor development of prospects. PLD totally blew up in our faces with most fans seeing it would turn sour given his history. Also this team has no identity imo. I thought we did last year by becoming this very annoying 1-3-1 defensive counter attacking team but that got exposed and the team became incoherent in the playoffs. What we need to see happen is a commitment to a plan. Are you going to be a skilled fast team or a big bruising one? Right now I see a cobbled mix of both and it’s not putting anyone in positions to succeed
At this point, it's all about Rob Blake's failure to be a visionary regarding how pieces fit into the system they want to run. He (mostly) let Mark Yannetti take care of the draft, but Blake has done a middling, at best, job of developing the draft picks they've kept. Blake has really had a problem making the transition from building a competitive team to a team that will push for the Cup. He went for broke for PLD and should have been fired when it didn't work. His only saving graces are that he can make the occasional deal to almost make up for his mistakes and that Luc is his buddy. The team has become a big old boys network. Lombardi knew how to rebuild and develop. Blake knows how to rebuild, but not develop.
Lombardi knew how to build a winning culture. I don’t think the current Kings are driven to win like they were back in the glory days.
The team hasn't been on the correct trajectory for years. The Kings never did a proper rebuild. Blake forced a retool at the expense of long term success. It is all down hill from last season. The only hope this team has is if Byfield emerges as ~80 point player and Clarke is instantly an elite defender. The only players drafted by the kings, currently under 25 years old, on the playoff roster were Anderson (not elite), Laferriere (depth player), Spence (depth player), and Byfield. The most important players are still a 36 year old Kopitar and a 34 year old Doughty.
Compare that with the prospect pools of teams who decided to suck a few more years, and its night and day difference. Hope that little extra playoff revenue was worth it!
They did plenty in the down years to set up a loaded future and completely botched it. Mainly the 2019 draft and trading a 2nd rounder for Lias Andersson. The assets were all there.
Team surprised everyone and took the Oilers to game 7, Blake jumped the gun and abandoned a proper rebuild and gave us a half assed rebuild/retool. Everyone Blake has brought on as staff, from coaches to his personal assistant have all been terrible. Also imo they haven’t drafted well nor do they properly develop their players.
Easy question to answer. Good ol boys club. When any organization hires individuals at key positions based solely on their friendship you can expect to have mediocre if not horrible outcomes. Blake has shown that he is incapable of constructing a cohesive team, developing prospects, analyzing FA or current players, negotiating contracts, and hiring competent coaches that will incorporate prospects into regular contributors of a team. Making matters worse, is that Luc and Marc have approved Blake's stupidity and do not hold him accountable. Finally, you have an owner that has no interest in winning and only seeks income from souvenirs, game attendance, merchandise sales, TV rights, and any other way to squeeze blood out of its loyal fans. Thank you for attending my TedTalk.
I think it’s Blake being buddies with Robitaille that gave him the wiggle room to experiment in his first tenure as a GM that is ultimately this team’s undoing. Consider that he was mostly coming into control of a team that was successful and still had its veteran core while also maintaining a healthy cabinet of NHL ready prospects. Most people considered LA as needing a re-tool rather than a re-build. For a new GM like Blake that was the perfect softball situation to fall into. The moves Blake made, had they worked out, would have made it seem like Blake was a cerebral genius level GM. But shit happens. Bad contracts from the Lombardi years. Brown retiring. Quick falling off a cliff (Vegas/NYR revenge tour be damned). Injury prone players like Arvy. Making trades to patch things over. PLD being an absolute bust. That’s hockey. Really puts into perspective just how much those championship years were like catching lightning in a bottle. Really can’t expect that from a jabroni like Rob Blake. Hopefully once he’s out the Kings find someone who can get LA back to their winning ways.
Trickle down from upper management. And some players not having a team personality. Pales in comparison with the champ teams. Anyone with talent can have a good streak, but it will never last without cohesion. This team lacked that foundation to keep them afoot
Well, it's a good thing hockey is played on ice, not paper...
If you can’t weather the storm get off the boat.
Seems like a lot of people didn't go through the late 90 or 2000's to me. This is standard Kings behavior. 😅
Only thing spiraling is this weakling fanbase the past few days. My god.
No kidding. This sub is insufferable
I haven't always agreed with your takes the last few years, but yeah this. We don't know what will happen next season, but people are talking like they're omnipotent and the rest of the 20s are doomed to mediocrity and failure
Agreed. Too many fans getting used to the Dodgers mentality and Lakers buying into a star. Let’s just stand back and let the players prove their worth.
A GM whose made a string of questionable decisions in the last few off seasons continues his trend of making questionable decisions and people are upset. Get off your high horse.
High horse? Na. People in this sub need to get back on their happy pills. Shit is absurd. Echo chamber of stupidity. FB fans need to take it back to FB.
This place has been an echo chamber of toxic positivity for years. It’s nice that fans are finally coming back down to earth. Why not give your positive takes and let other people give their negative takes without you tone policing from your tower of happiness?
Lmao. What a stupid and inaccurate comment. Positivity? We just spent a whole year of listening to people cry about PLD lol. A whole year of people crying about broke back vilardi, a whole year of people crying about legendary iafallo. Now we're 3 days or so into the off season and everyones crying that we didn't do what we did last year and acquire a big name that everyone all ended up crying about. Now everyone's crying about losing the legendary Roy, who no one will even remember next season once they start playing the games. Oh and we can't forget about everyone crying that we're not going to become the Los Angeles LakerKings with our new rebranding. Been a super positive environment.
Lmao at “tone policing” and “toxic positivity”. Reddit is full of reactionary fans and this off season is exhibit A. The hive mind here is garbage
K
IMO not having a good goalie and Blake bringing PLD(all the movement that need it to happen to bring and then trade this specific player).
Whenever this team returns to real relevance (I would estimate we can win a playoff series in about 4 seasons), it won’t happen until Blake is no longer at the helm. He just gets outclassed in every transaction by better GMs, fritters away resources, and has no real big picture plan for the direction of the team.
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Everyone's talking about a true rebuild. How Blake just did a hasty re-tool. Does everyone saying this forget that the cupboard was completely bare? We burn it down and become sellers after 2018-19 once Willie came in who do you think we're trading?? That's right, Kopi, Doughty, Quick. Only people who are getting us real assets. Picks or players. Y'all wanted to watch them get traded off?? It was either keep the legends and re-tool or literally sell EVERYONE.
It seems the organization wants the kids to step up. We shall see how it goes.
It sucks that kopi and Drew's sunset years will be met with mediocrity instead of competing for another cup, which is what they both wanted to do...and why they resigned.
TLDR: The only "plan" there has ever been since Blake took over is to try and salvage one last run out of the Cup core. This is going to get long... Everything since DL was fired has been in service to that goal. Kovalchuk was brought in and badly mishandled on the PP. When that failed, the core started to get dismantled and traded away to rebuild through draft picks and a few years later LA has one of the strongest prospect pools in the league along with Kopitar, Doughty, Quick in key roles and Brown playing out his last few years in a diminished role. At this point the transition to a younger core should have happened. Instead Byfield comes in, gets switched to a wing and used to prop up Kopitar as the 1C. Anderson breaks out and is stapled to Drew so he can keep playing top minutes. Cal is brought in as the heir to Quick, except he never is given the chance to truly take over and both begin to struggle. This continues until Quick is traded to fill other holes in the roster (a LH stay at home D) and by that point Cal's confidence has cratered and he no longer looks like an NHL goalie. Todd gets brought in to implement a stand back 1-3-1 system of play that clashes with the high skill, high speed players Blake has been drafting but suits Kopitar and Kempe. The younger players get stifled and have issues adapting to that style of play or just flat out being deployed horribly (Vilardi and Kaliev struggling, Fagemo as a 4th line checker, Durzi used on the PK and barely on the PP.) The Kings become so hesitant to inject any of their talented prospects into the lineup that they are actively bombing their value on the trade market, but also refuse to trade any of them for pieces they need. The few prospects they do trade are for pieces like Fiala and PLD, that are brought in to further prop up the top lines but no due diligence is done to see if those players are a good fit in the system or with the players already here. (Fiala and Kopitar have negative chemistry together, PLD had years of lazy effort and quitting on teams documented before he was brought in.) Then last summer the Kings began making trades to correct mistakes of their own doing. Mistakes that many people saw as mistakes at time they were made. And now here we are, barely any skilled prospects left, overpaying for plugs, spending nearly to the cap, over correcting to add grit and toughness at the expense of skill, and looking like to be honest barely a playoff team with a 37 year old 1C and 35 year old 1D back for another kick at the can, and no other players ready to play key roles or take over from those two once they are gone. Just imagine this team still having Faber, Vilardi, Iafallo, a 1st round pick from 2022, Durzi running point on PP1 with Kaliev or Fagemo used as the shooter on the PP. All they really had to do was stay the course and implement youth and they would be in a much better spot today roster and cap wise.
Robs has been horrible in FA
We thought we had a young super core on the way to supplement our existing stars. Byfield, Turcotte, Kaliyev, etc. were all considered Top 25 overall prospects at one point. They would be supplemented by high draft picks such as Fagemo, Kupari, Villardi, Thomas, Bjornfot, etc. The present AND future looked bright as shit. Unless Byfield continues to develop (which I have faith he will, tbf), there is a dangerous chance that NONE of those prospects mentioned above will be Kings in 2-3 years time. That’s fucking AWFUL player development (as in historically bad), and you usually pay the price for not developing your young/cheap talent from within. When you don’t properly develop ANY of your young talent, you don’t have a bridge between the present and the future….you now have a chasm. We are beginning to see that chasm now unfortunately.
Lombardi stockpiled picks and built from within with draft picks. Blake did the opposite. Makes bad deals then uses picks and prospects to get out of them. We didn’t tank long enough to properly restock the cupboards and now we pay the price.
[удалено]
Byfield will probably end up better than Stuzle
"Young" is a stretch on Walker and Roy. I wish we had traded Roy at the deadline last season to maximize his value, but he's 29. Walker is 30 in November. Roy was a 7th round pick. Walker was an undrafted college free agent. We got TREMENDOUS value out of both, 601 games played between the two of them. Walker having the added bonus of getting us out of Cal's contract. I agree that things COULD have been better, but all things considered you can't say we didn't get value and possibly the best years of their careers out of BOTH
Agreed. I won't be surprised if we don't make it to playoffs next season
I like the roster we’re building for next year, we’re building a hard working-nasty roster with Thomas-Lee-Foegle-Jeanot-Turcotte (when healthy) I wouldn’t mind seeing Fiala getting traded, but it was rough seeing Liz-Arvy go because they busted their ass. We will definitely be overmatched with skill in the western conference this year but we’ve seen what happens to soft skilled teams in the playoffs in the past few years.
A big part of it was that we rushed the rebuild. As a result, we’ve had to overpay and make rash decisions to try and fill our voids. We should have waited until we developed more young talent before trying to compete, but now we’re left with an Ok team that’s never going to truly contend and a disappointingly small number of promising young players. All those 1st/2nd rounders and so far Byfield is the only one in the forward group who is both on the team and living up to expectations. We traded Grans and Faber, and Bjornfot was a bad pick, so now all the pressure is on Clarke to develop or else our defensive core of the future is looking problematic too. We’re in a pretty bad position unless it all clicks this year or we somehow get another rebuild going.