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

[FSL KINGS]

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

PL had good analytics at the time the King's traded for him.

Fancy Stats, you create a model, it pumps out numbers & everyone is amazed at the awesomeness.
1) Models have points they don't work past & break.
2) The data needs to be analysed. With PL, why does he have a high xGF? How is that going to fit? Will the coach be able to use him?

Hearing that the King's are developing their "crown" fancy Stats is great. Still have no faith in the clowns running this thing to understand what the numbers mean, or apply those numbers to benefit the team in some Money Ball situation.

I don't post enough to understand how to quote in this forum, but building off of something Telos posted regarding Luc's comments, and yes this is going to be nothing more than me going blah blah blah.

I look at the Dodgers and Lakers and they make those league shaking moves. Obviously this is off the heels of the Doncic trade but the Dodgers signed Ohtani and basically every other major free agent they want. The Kings don't seem to have that same appeal or ability. Yes hard cap, yes top end players are rarely available via free agents or trades blah blah blah. But I see this organization as unwilling or unable to go out of their way to push for top 10 players. Maybe it's a management thing, maybe it's an ownership thing, I dunno I'm simply a fan but this is freakin Los Angeles. Players should WANT to come here.

...damn this forum has gotten me to post twice in a calendar year.

"Superstar", very few true Superstar are available. The fear being, does Superstar mean someone the King's can use to sell tickets. With Kopi & Doughty getting old & Byfield still looking like a project Luc needs to be able to slap a face on the team ads.

Are we talking about a MacKinnon or can we sell Laine as a Superstar for casual LA fans that don't know what snow is? Can't wait for Marner being signed to a ridiculous contract & sold as a "Superstar".

 

[lumbergh]

"Superstar", very few true Superstar are available. The fear being, does Superstar mean someone the King's can use to sell tickets. With Kopi & Doughty getting old & Byfield still looking like a project Luc needs to be able to slap a face on the team ads.

Are we talking about a MacKinnon or can we sell Laine as a Superstar for casual LA fans that don't know what snow is? Can't wait for Marner being signed to a ridiculous contract & sold as a "Superstar".

Connor McDavid's contract runs out at the end of next season. The Kings have poached a superstar from the Oilers before. Just sayin'.

 

[Trash Panda]

Connor McDavid's contract runs out at the end of next season. The Kings have poached a superstar from the Oilers before. Just sayin'.

Unless he comes to LA at his current salary? Pass.

Poaching UFA stars doesn’t lead to championships in a cap world. It just extends the purgatory of being first round fodder. Ask the Rangers & leafs how being perpetual “free agency champs” has gone.

 

[JTeller97]

Connor McDavid's contract runs out at the end of next season. The Kings have poached a superstar from the Oilers before. Just sayin'.

I thought we might've had a chance before Leon resigned but with him locked up gotta McD stays with his running mate

 

[SettlementRichie10]

Imagine if we had the Kopitar that made $7m back in 2010.

 

[SmytheKing]

Imagine if we had the Kopitar that made $7m back in 2010.

Just for context, that would be approximately $10.3 million today relative to cap hit.

 

[Raccoon Jesus]

In fairness to Luc and Blake, they don't have the advantages that those teams have when it comes to making moves.

The Kings can't spend 2.5x the league average on their payroll to construct an all-star team, and the Avs ownership isn't going to force their GM to trade MacKinnon for Kempe and Clarke without offering him to anyone else in the league.

Just a different world, the NHL is more like the NFL, where you really have to do it through the draft. That is the knock on what BLuc did, not properly constructing a championship caliber roster through the draft, tough to big-game hunt in the NHL.

LA in the NHL is a far different destination than LA in MLB/NBA and even NFL for player origin reasons especially. In baseball, they've leaned in heavily to the Japanese markets (DR players and others still overwhelmingly head to the Yanks/east coast/south). NBA/NFL are largely american-centric, the college influence isn't as heavy as international family. In the NHL, where the players are both cold-climate centric as a whole AND across the world in the OTHER direction, 'closer to home' is as far from LA as possible. I guess if Japan/Korea/China/Australia/NZ started producing NHLers, LA and Sj would start being major attractions.

I think LA plays well with British Columbians/Albertans but it's tough to get players from east of that or Europe for a lot of that and even if LA were a model franchise I don't see that changing much. Between regionality, hard cap, LA being kind of a mid hockey market from a tradition standpoint, and the NHL being less superstar/single-player-driven than some of the other leagues, Kings don't have nearly the push the other LA major sports teams have, regardless of the clowns in the cabin.

 

[NikF]

Is there even any evidence of heavy analytics-usage leading to success? I only follow hockey and soccer. Real Madrid which are probably the best sports franchise in the world pretty much rely on acquiring the best players and world's best winning culture. In hockey from what I can gather the most analytics heavy team is Carolina which while good hasn't won anything yet. Don't know other sports, maybe in baseball it works. I think winning is mostly just getting the best players and forming a good culture with supplementary pieces that fit the team stylistically around them. Analytics feels like it's narrative-driven with the general economic-technological boom but where's the evidence that teams that heavily rely on them actually win due to them? I haven't seen it. That's not that they don't have an utility, it's just ridiculous the narrative around it like it's some secret cheat-code for success.

 

[Raccoon Jesus]

Is there even any evidence of heavy analytics-usage leading to success? I only follow hockey and soccer. Real Madrid which are probably the best sports franchise in the world pretty much rely on acquiring the best players and world's best winning culture. In hockey from what I can gather the most analytics heavy team is Carolina which while good hasn't won anything yet. Don't know other sports, maybe in baseball it works. I think winning is mostly just getting the best players and forming a good culture with supplementary pieces that fit the team stylistically around them. Analytics feels like it's narrative-driven with the general economic-technological boom but where's the evidence that teams that heavily rely on them actually win due to them? I haven't seen it. That's not that they don't have an utility, it's just ridiculous the narrative around it like it's some secret cheat-code for success.

I can never find the writeups now but even prior to Sutter the Kings were ahead of the game on that...remember 'injury analytics' being a big reason they were so comfortable with Williams for example. Of course the best stuff is proprietary/behind-the-scenes so we'd never know, evidence would be hard to find for sure. I agree that the 'best players' would supersede any spreadsheet but I suspect a lot of it is stylistic, ie finding players who are excellent at defending zone entries to fit your system, rather than just raw moneyball-style 'find the undervalued players' (though I'd argue that's exactly what Blake did well in pursuing Arvidsson and Danault at their times).

And it's definitely not a cheat code, that much is certain

 

[NikF]

The problem is you don't know why a player is good at defending zone entries. You could get a statistic that says x player is 3rd at defending zone entries but you are missing the context that perhaps that team's coach heavily favors standing up at the blueline aggressively which might lead to less zone entries than a player who might be equally good at defending entries but is playing for a team that prefers defensemen to back off a bit more and forwards to backcheck harder. Especially if they accomplish similar GA how are you going to tell who is the better zone entry defender between the two? Well you could say our data shows that teams that aggressively deny zone entries are better anyways so just take the guy that's playing right that now. But what happens if player B switches teams and in a new system his zone-entry defense jumps over player A's stats? Did he magically get better? There's a qualitative content involved at why a certain player accomplishes a certain output that you will never get with stats. They will just tell you that this output is being accomplished.

 

[Raccoon Jesus]

The problem is you don't know why a player is good at defending zone entries. You could get a statistic that says x player is 3rd at defending zone entries but you are missing the context that perhaps that team's coach heavily favors standing up at the blueline aggressively which might lead to less zone entries than a player who might be equally good at defending entries but is playing for a team that prefers defensemen to back off a bit more and forwards to backcheck harder. Especially if they accomplish similar GA how are you going to tell who is the better zone entry defender between the two? Well you could say our data shows that teams that aggressively deny zone entries are better anyways so just take the guy that's playing right that now. But what happens if player B switches teams and in a new system his zone-entry defense jumps over player A's stats? Did he magically get better? There's a qualitative content involved at why a certain player accomplishes a certain output that you will never get with stats. They will just tell you that this output is being accomplished.

That's not a 'problem,' that's a good illustration of a stat leading to further inquiry. That's a good thing and what most statisticians want. Sure we're all in pursuit of 'answers' but I doubt the real analytics nerds are the type to just post a WAR chart as a catchall.

The problem would be saying "see lets go get him" without your further inquiries and as much as I pick on the Kings *cough PLD stats* I'd like to think they at least go down the road of inquiry.

 

[King'sPawn]

 

[Bandit]

Yet Burroughs remains...

 

[lumbergh]

Best of luck in Nashville ... except when you play the Kings.

 

[AbsentMojo]

I guess this was done to save a bit of salary 1m aav pro-rated for a possible trade

worried what kind of trade Bluc is trying to make

 

[FrozenKing18]

I'm convinced that NSH and LA are just one organization.

 

[BaileyFan]

Barry Trotz loves his Kings waiver castoffs.

Might be the only GM in the league I wouldn’t trade Blake for right now. His nonsense about how rebuilds these days take 12 years has destroyed that team.

 

[lumbergh]

I guess this was done to save a bit of salary 1m aav pro-rated for a possible trade

worried what kind of trade Bluc is trying to make

I don't think it's any secret the Kings need to add a scorer. It's just a matter of which one the Kings can get under the cap.

 

[AbsentMojo]

I don't think it's any secret the Kings need to add a scorer. It's just a matter of which one the Kings can get under the cap.

You wonder if they use metrics from the existing team and think it will translate to blucology legacy moves us to the black hole approach... I think anyone they add must already be a 2-way or will be cast out.

 

[KingsHockey24]

It's all fun and games until we wind up with Daniel Sprong.