Man, Laferriere is a PLAYER.
IMO they should start to use him more on PP1. Get him some more touches and start to try to feed him pucks in that bumper slot. His shot may not be elite but it's good enough where he'd score some goals from that area. You also generate lots of rebounds when shooting from that area.
Yep... If the Kings continue to look like this (very mid), this is 1000% the right approach. The crazy thing is, the Kings could actually set themselves up really nicely if they went this route (assuming they made some smart moves/signings along the way - which obviously isn't a given lol).
Like imagine they traded Fiala, Moore, Danault, and Gavikrov for picks/prospects and just used the rest of the season to give Byfield, Clarke, Turcotte, Spence, and Laferriere as much ice time as possible. Trading those 4 players would free up over $23m in cap space for the Kings and the cap is going to go up another $4-5m at least. That means the Kings could have nearly $30m in cap space going into next off season. With that kind of money, you can sign a top pairing LHD (maybe in the $7m range) and a top 6 scoring winger (maybe in the $5-6m range) and still have money to fill out the rest of the roster.
You'd do all that while also prioritizing the young players that need to be the future of this team. Then you can start to build something around Byfield, Turcotte, Clarke, Laferriere, and Spence, who all will have just spent this season in elevated roles learning from their mistakes and working through growing pains.
But as we all know, management is going to try to milk every last win they possibly can out of this team so they can try to save their own jobs. Sad.
