Speculation: Another year of this Bluc **** (The 2024-25 season thread)

[KingsHockey24]

Obviously I don't mind the trade at all but man ..

Brayden Schenn would've made an awesome LA King.

 

[Bandit]

Can we have contest? Come up with a single word that describes Fiala

Woof.

 

[Telos]

Eddie Garcia on Locked on Kings went to the Lunch with Luc season ticket holder event and gave some highlights about what was discussed:

Some highlights that got my attention:

• Said that Philip Anschutz has given pretty much a green light to sign, acquire, or spend on any player/superstar they bring up to him, and when asked if they were going to spend up to the new upcoming caps of $95.5M, $104M, and $113.5M he said: "we have to".
• They are expecting to have about $5M to play with at the trade deadline and are targeting a physical forward, pretty much a gritty 20+ goal scorer.
• This front office is leaning hard into data and analytics and are using something called "The Crown" that he assumed was a software/program. They've said this before, but I still find it interesting and am wondering if they are leaning too hard into the Moneyball aspect.
• The team is going back to 11/7 when Mikey Anderson returns.
• The team wants to keep Gavrikov and Anderson together and move Doughty to the 2nd pairing when Mikey returns.

A couple of ones I thought were just interesting:

• Luc is intentionally scheduling games at 5PM and earlier on Saturdays because some teams play those against us back-to-back against Anaheim and he wants a competitive advantage by giving them less rest. Apparently, Yzerman complained about this. The rest of our Saturday games are 5PM or earlier and all of them have a day of rest before them for the Kings.
• Also Luc said before the start of the 3rd period during Game 1 of the 1993 Stanley Cup Finals, Gretzky told the team in the locker room to check the curves of their sticks to make sure they didn't have an illegal curve. That's the first time I heard that story.

Anyway, you can check the rest out here:

 

[CarlSneep]

I feel like you can pretty clearly see the difference between “analytics moves” (goalies, Englund, Burroughs, Foegele) and “Luc moves” (PLD, Edmundson)

 

[tigermask48]

Full-time amateur scouts probably don't have a lot of time to commit to it. I'm sure there's digging on information through contacts and maybe some part-timers. And it's true you can't project too far out. But I think having one or two people full-time on the job would provide advantages. As for the roadmap...I was thinking if a team feels like maybe they will have to blow it up within the next 2-3 years and there's indications that maybe year 2 has two phenoms top of the draft class and a deep group, you could say that's the time to blow it up rather than a year later or the year earlier.

This already happens in a couple of ways depending on the geographical location.

For example I know for a fact the Kings had Tony Gasparini scouting the Midwest US heavily before he became the GM of Souix Falls a couple years ago.
I would see him at things like the Minnesota Select camps, or High School hockey tournaments here and there and then also at some of the college games I would be at.
So the Kings definitely do this already, I recall Tony once talking about seeing Thomas Vanek play as a 14 or 15 year old in Souix Falls.

The other way this happens is sort of a trickle down type of thing. An NHL scout will often have a bunch of contacts in an area they scout heavily. One of those contacts has a couple scouts watching 14-15 year olds while scouting for Junior level players. They find a guy they like and the NHL scout gets tipped off to maybe look into this kid when his draft comes around.