Did you just completely overlook the points I made so you can make a pointless and sarcastic post?
Please feel free to discuss with others.
You're right and I apologize. I agree that cost-effective players is key.
I DO strongly disagree with making change just for the sake of change. If you make a directionless move, you have a meaningless message other than "We don't like the way things are, and we don't know why."
Lifers were NEVER safe and secure in my post. Ultimately, players in the system have to force their way onto the lineup, just the same way King and Nolan forced themselves into the lineup. Just the same way Voynov made it easier to trade Jack Johnson.
No GM worth their salt will trade away the top players who won the cup just because the team isn't as strong a contender as before. Notice that Quick is no longer "safe" even though he's universally revered as one of the best Kings goalies ever. Cal Petersen has stepped up in the organization. Once Turcotte, Vilardi, JAD, ANYONE can step up and be the #1 center, trade Kopitar. Nobody has overcome a now 35 year-old Dustin Brown who has frustrated you and me for the past 10+ years.
I think for the most part we're on the same page, but you feel a GM needs to make a move which is indefensible: trading away a core cup winner with absolutely nothing in the pipeline to replace him, all to start a rebuild a year after winning the cup. You'll be vetoed by ownership at best, with other consequences including unemployed.
Yet it was clearly the best decsion.
I didn't advocate trading a Kopitar in the middle of a contract, I advocated trading him instead of maxing him out. It was always going to be bad business. The Kings weren't going to get anywhere near full value out of that deal, not even half of it.
The timing is the issue here. So many arguing against this are looking at it in a vacuum instead of reading the terrain, which is usually the biggest source of conflict I have with other posters.
Once the 14-15 season ended, and the host of problems Lombardi had created for.the back end of his era were starting to develop, it was clear that the organization had to take a more pragmatic and less fanciful view of the future. At that point you look at your asset list, see that it is totally bereft of talent, and the only realistic conclusion is that you don't have enough - hell, any - cost-controlled assets to supplement your aging roster. A gap was inevitable.
Now all the folks that lamented about losing their favorite players were arguing that trading them away would hurt attendance, hurt moral, take them out of the playoff hunt, and I argued that all of that was going to happen regardless of keeping Kopitar, Brown and Quick. I argued that Carter, Muzzin and Quick all should have been dealt 4 years ago before it was too late to recover value.
And all that panned out that way. Now there are dead dollars and dead moral and dead leadership on a team in the middle of a talent gap that isn't as close to narrowing as some are assuming due to the recent quality added.
Change for changes sake was needed to freshen up a stale room littered with biggest group of retirement contacts the cap era has seen on any one roster. You see the damage of not making those changes in the way the roster quits on coaches, has awful practices, lets two goal deficits turn into five goal deficits at the drop of the hat. There is zero internal accountability and honestly, a real lack of reality in a group that still thought that they were contenders when they were done.
