BigKing
Blake Out of Hell III: Back in to Hell
If he is at the the helm and takes this team from last season to a perennial contender eventually, I'll find him to be a good GM. More simply put: I'll find him to be a good GM if he is a good GM. I don't think I am being overly harsh at the moment. We really can't just brush away last season like it wasn't the biggest abomination of this century for the Kings.
I'm not calling him a failure overall, although his work at the NHL level has been lacking. Sometimes you need dumb luck as it is actually better they had the season they had last year since it led to Turcotte, the Muzzin deal and AK. I'm not giving him credit for it since he actually thought he had a contender but I'm hoping it was the best thing that could happen to him, akin to things that were fortunate for DL like Smyth demanding a trade and Brad Richards not signing here.
Patience is indeed important but patience was not preached from the moment he took the job. Now it is being preached and turns out to be what should have happened from the start. That's kind of the rub for me: he pretty much gets a pass for his first two years and it is cool because they just had maybe the best draft in the league on paper and we appear to be rebuilding like most of us wanted. That doesn't change the fact that he made bad decisions and set the timeline back by not getting down to business in the first place. Is that actually Blake or is that the Luc/AEG machine wanting to milk those championship udders until they are raw? Not sure but Blake is the GM so he takes the fall.
Where my bias comes in is how he was given so much credit during the 2018 season like he actually did much of anything to that roster. People also feted him because of it while taking shots at Lombardi which was annoying. There kind of was a consensus that we shouldn't judge him until how he handles his first full draft (which I think is dumb since it is the same scouts and he was in the organization in 2017) and his first full off-season after running the show for a year. We all know how it went but now the goalposts seemed to have moved to where we need to give him more time. I get that judging DL after two seasons would lead to a horrible grade but the circumstances were much different. Of course he needs more time because we need to see these prospects at the NHL level but what we've seen so far has not been good. He's presided over the apparent erosion of a culture that took years to cultivate and he is partly responsible for that with the coaching hires. Hopefully he rectifies it but it isn't a good look right now.
And as I mentioned before, if these prospects hit at a high rate, these garbage seasons will be a fart in the wind. There just isn't much of a breeze at the moment.
