God thats so f***ing dumb. I cant believe we're going in 2025 with f***ing Kopitar and Doughty at the helm. f***ing crazy they're the main pieces and the role players. Absolutely crazy.
This organization is going to be buffalo. We're drifting into nothingness.
Kings are like the story of Icarus man. We soared so high and management kept pushing players who weren't worth building upon anymore.
You don't have to go all the way across the country to make a comparison.
This organization is still the Los Angeles Kings. We've always been the Kings except for when the veteran acquisition was Gretzky and for DL's tenure.
We aren't drifting into nothingness: we've already been there for years when it comes to mattering in the grand scheme of the entire league.
I'm excluding the 60s, 70's and pre-Gretzky 80's since I don't know how the playoffs worked back then but the Kings were making the playoffs sometimes while losing 20 more games than they won. So starting with Gretzky, the best stretch of consecutive playoff appearances was five years in a row from the season 99 arrived along with DL's squad from 2010 -14.
Three years in a row looks pretty great historically and is the second best streak under AEG, matching the one from 2000 - 2002. When you have a franchise that has made the playoffs only 19 times in the last 35 years, no wonder these lame ass f***s think they are "right there".
After 2002, the Kings missed the playoffs for six straight seasons and were most likely saved from seven seasons by the lockout. Halfway through 2001, Blake was gone. By 2002, Luc was gone. The organization is being run by dudes from these teams. Are we gearing up to match the five straight appearances or are we teetering closer to the six straight years of missing the playoffs? Feels very much like these dorks are running it back for one more year and then will probably not be here after another failure: at least in Blake's case.
This franchise has mostly been a joke and we are right back where we've usually been, except we got to taste success for a brief moment in time so it sucks more to suck. It's also why this franchise hasn't wanted to move on from the main dudes that helped make that brief moment happen and, let it be known, the vocal minority on here that advocates moving on from these Kings legends are a small fraction of the fan base: especially the ones paying for tickets.
So we're screwed.
FYI: I pulled those playoff numbers from a website called champs or chumps. They have a "fan report card" that judges the last ten years, although it appears it is running it from the 2014-2015 season, or they consider one title in ten years to only be worth a D+. Here are the grades:
Championships Won: D+
Regular Season Success: C
Playoff Success: F
Suffering: Excessive
Current Trajectory: Improving (this is built over a three year period but isn't taking into account 7-6-5 total games while losing to the same team every year)
Overall: F
Checks out. Again, this stretch has been horrific. This report card isn't even taking into account excitement/entertainment level, which has mostly been trash under Bluc. The suffering doesn't seem excessive because the euphoria of winning the two Cups kind of took the edge off until the Willie D season but, yeah, the suffering is excessive from an outsiders perspective. They haven't done a f***ing thing for ten seasons now. That's nearly 25% of my entire life and it feels like it will take a while to dig out of this current mess.
