Maybe the Kings should hire KJP when she is done at the White House.
No need to add that expense, they have "Kings of the Podcast" to do that.
Speaking of which, it looks like Pravda turned off comments on the stuff they posted today.
To possibly add something to Herby's point about it being both scouting and development. You really just have to look back about 4-5 years later to see how bad the Kings have done at both.
The Kings at one point had almost the consensus top prospect pool in the league, but almost zero players that were a good fit for the type of hockey the Kings wanted to play.
The few of those highly thought of prospects that did make it to the NHL (Bjornfot, JAD, Petersen, Vilardi, Kaliev, Durzi) have arguably all never looked better than they did as rookies.
The Kings just took all this talent and wasted it, turning these guys into just another guy players.
The scouting never identified players to fit the Kings and refused to develop the talent the prospects did have. It's just a huge waste.
It's all those things.
They simply made the wrong pick countless times, no development philosophy was going to change that. The Alex Turcotte pick in the Top 5 is a disaster for a team that ended a rebuild early. People mention Thomas Hickey and how that pick didn't matter, but forget that Hickey was part of a rebuild that featured three Hall of Fame players, it's easier to whiff on a Top 5 pick when you can go forward with Kopitar, Doughty and Quick. Had this rebuild been continued for 3 more years and you have Fantilli, Gauthier, Byfield, Faber, a Top-10 pick this year, Anderson and Vilardi things are different, and you can write off Turcotte and Bjornfot as this eras Hickey and Teubert. But that didn't happen, Rob Blake's reaction to his poor drafting was to end the rebuild and bring in older veterans rather than try and keep adding the pieces needed, despite the fact that his strategy has never worked. So when you only end up three star caliber picks picks you really make it where you have to hit on all of them, which they didn't.
But certainly it's not all evaluation, and even if most of it was evaluation there is still no excuse for the development failures. The teenagers in the AHL strategy completely blew up in their faces. Bjornfot flopped and is gone, Kaliyev is about to be gone, Turcotte is one of the worst Top 5 picks in recent memory, Kupari turned into the Finnish Nick Shore, Byfield was a #2 OA pick who just now in his 4th season cracked 20 goals and 50 points. All these players were in the AHL before age 20, and the only one who should have been was Kaliyev. What is both ironic and sad about it is that Blake and Robitaille never played in the AHL, yet insist on rushing players from successful development situations and make it where everyone coming up has to pay their dues in the AHL (Only the McDavid's of the world don't need AHL time). Maybe one day one of the state-controlled media might bring this up to them and we can get some answers, but probably not.