Sure, LA had different players - probably better or more "elite" at their positions then the Blues vets when they entered their rebuild. Similar to quality of draft picks tho, I think quality of vets is somewhat beside the point.
What was more important IMO when looking at Armstrong's comparison of the Blues now to LA several years ago is the timeline and the overall strategy LA used to get there. Of course the two situations are different in some ways and maybe it's worth while to folks to outline and dissect the differences. Personally tho, I think the important comparison is one of strategy rather than player/pick detail (if that makes sense).
To your question of whether or not the "LA model" is a good one to follow, I would say this: the league is littered with other teams who followed a different model to tear it all down to the studs and have a scorched earth rebuild, but have still not come out of it. Heck, some even drafted multiple super stars but still haven't won anything.
IMO, I am not sure it’s more important to use a view where we squint at the Kings and say “let’s do something like that, but not really follow the model” (my interpretation of what we are doing). If anything we are looking at a different model if we aren’t following it to some degree of proximity. Army seems to be trying to skip chunks of the LA approach. My concern is we will be less than the Kings as a result and to reiterate they really haven’t shown the model is successful yet.
I hear you that rebuilds don’t always work. But, regardless of approach, you have to be damn good at drafting, developing, trading and signing players to win a Cup. When people (not saying you) bring up teams Edmonton (that have failed with their rebuild) I tend disregard the comment because they had poor front offices running the ship ashore. If our management is that bad then nothing we do will work, just like nothing those teams do will work until they find the right people to drive the thing. Those teams have failed on multiple of those four areas.
On our end of things here is how I see us on those four fronts:
We are drafting pretty well. Our forward stable looks nice. I like our goaltending prospects. We need more to show on the defensive front.
Player development is tough to judge. Forwards and goalies seem to be progressing nicely, but is that due to drafting the right guys or our coaches are doing good work? Maybe both? Our defensemen are another matter. I wonder how much of our defensive stable is poor because of player development given the success we see of young defenseman going elsewhere and being successful. It’s something to keep an eye on.
We need a lot better roster management than we have seen post Cup. Sure we have wins like trading for Buch. But, I am still frustrated at our defensive core. We let Dunn go even though we were heading for a rebuild / retool at some point and our D was aging. Instead of keeping an emerging talent, we chose an old guard approach which hasn’t helped our horizon. Signing Krug has never made sense to me when we already had Dunn. It also made us have less transition speed out of the backend, something that is ever important in the NHL. Scandella was also not a great move and the corresponding signing as well. We overpaid twice (trade and signing) and while the player is fine, it further solidified a short term approach and poor cap management IMO.
I am frustrated with the contracts we have given to secondary core pieces. I used to like Army’s contracts when we were dealing with young guys, but I haven’t particularly liked his handling of vet contracts. Army has made a mess of our roster particularly defensively and he will have to show he can retool/rebuild effectively in a changing NHL landscape. I generally think Army is one of the better GMs in the game, but I don’t care for his last few years, nor am I confident in his ability to not rush a rebuild (which given this season and the one prior, I think it’s fair to call this a light rebuild or very heavy retool). Army needs to step up his game, especially on the defensive end of the roster.
Bringing this back to the LA model, they have made the playoffs and exited in the first round three times in the last six years. From the 2018-2020 seasons they were bad. To back this up to the first pick near top ten (since that is where we are starting), over the past 7 years they drafted 11, 20, 5, 2, 8, 0, 0. In that same period we drafted 20, 25, 0, 26, 17, 23, 10, 25, & 29. So they have higher picks and we have more in that same time frame.
LA started their rebuild 5 years ago at the earliest and 7 if you want to go back to their playoff miss that landed them 11th overall. We started ours after the end of 21-22. So this is year 2 of ours. They were bad in 4 of their last 7 years with three straight awful years in the last 5. We are in year two no matter how we look at it while they were rebuilding 3-5 years depending upon when you determine they started.
I would argue that we haven’t cratered as deep as them given our standing last year and where we are currently this year. I would also argue that they had better core talent retained, younger secondary core talent and currently have less baggage contracts (not saying we cannot get there, but rather we haven’t). Their emerging young core is better balanced across offense and defense than ours.
Honestly I do not love that they tried to speed up the rebuild by doing the PLD trade and it may be a move that bites them. I will be interested in seeing how that plays out.
