Hard to say that Lombardi learned from his mistakes or was trying to right the ship when he offered Lucic an 8 year deal.
And you can’t say that he knew he wasn’t going to accept it, he waived Greene to buy himself the cap space he thought he needed.
Lombardi had zero ability when it came to the cap and the fact that players aged and declined.
Smyth trade was a joke. Took on a 33 year old winger making 6.2 mill a year for three years when the cap was at 56 mill. Would be like Blake trading for Nash this summer except instead of being on an expiring deal he’d have 3 years left at 8+ mill. I don’t think people realize how fortunate the Kings were with how that played out, if Smyth hadn’t wanted to “go home” to the only team that was going to extend him the Kings wouldn’t have had the money to trade for Carter.
Brad Richards as others have mentioned, another guy who probably torpedoes the Kings chances to win.
Give Lombardi credit for building on what he was left with in Kopitar and Quick and adding the correct pieces around them to get over the top. But Dean had to make all these trades and signings because other than Doughty they weren’t able to add enough of these types of guys through the draft and had to pay ridiculously high prices in FA and/or trade to get these guys.
It was a tough situation for DL and ownership. DL made a lot of great moves and had a lot of good luck between 2010 and 2014 and then from 2014 to 2017 it was terrible moves compounded with terrible luck.
Still think Lombardi’s best situation is to either take over a team right on the cusp that just needs to add the right player or two or the situation he was in here where he inherited a plug and play star forward and an elite young goalie to build around.
