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On Alex Turcotte and the call-ups. There’s a fresh face at every curve within Los Angeles’ dressing room. Their average age after Thursday’s call-ups is 27.1, significantly younger than Dallas’ sage 28.4. And though neither Turcotte nor Bjornfot are expected to get into tonight’s game, when he does enter in, Turcotte
will become the seventh former first round draft pick under 25 to play for the Kings this season, tying a record set by Bob Carpenter, Craig Duncanson, Dan Gratton, Chris Kontos, Wayne McBean and Craig Redmond of the 1987-88 Kings.
Draft position, of course, means little once a player secures an NHL spot. “I don’t care if they’re drafted first overall or in the second round. I value Blake Lizotte’s ability to contribute to the team as much as I do Quinton Byfield’s,” McLellan said.
But there obviously exists much greater focus on a player drafted with a lottery pick after a dismal year, as is the case with Byfield, selected second overall in 2020, and Turcotte, selected fifth in 2019. That players selected in their shadow have excelled does not at all shift this gaze. Tim Stutzle, who maintained his point-a-game pace with his 20th goal of the season last night, was viewed as the only skater on a similar tier to Byfield when he was drafted one spot later, while Turcotte, one of just six of players taken in the 2019 first round yet to reach 10 NHL games, has a long way to go to escape the shadows of Moritz Seider and Trevor Zegras, selected sixth and ninth overall.
The team certainly doesn’t want Turcotte preoccupied with the 10,000 foot view, but it’s an important chapter not only in the story of the 2022-23 team but also the ceiling to which this current generation can ascend. There were voices within the team’s scouting and drafting cognoscenti making a strong case for Zegras over Turcotte,
according to multiple Forum Report sources, and though there’s still ample room for the hardened, two-way center to emerge from a brutal run of injuries and grow as a professional, I can’t say there’s a great deal of optimism within the organization towards Turcotte, who has been included in trade discussions since at least this past summer.
