I know you are super smart and put tons of effort and thought into your posts unlike me....but you are beyond delusional if you don't think that EVERY organization's goal...EVERY year...is to make the playoffs.
No, I don't have any fancy stats to back it up.
This is simply not true.
Chicago is not trying to make the playoffs this year. Neither is San Jose, Arizona, Seattle, Anaheim. You have to be realistic about where you are, getting a Top 5 pick is more valuable for a franchise than chasing a 5-10% chance to make the playoffs.
Last year the Kings transitioned from not trying to make the playoffs to trying to. And they were successful at achieving that short term goal. That is why breaking in your hopeful future franchise player in the middle of a playoff race on a low-scoring team Instead of the year before on a team without playoff aspirations made no sense. Most of those teams over the years who broke in Top 2 picks were not playoff caliber teams and could afford to let the player take his lumps, the 2021-2022 Kings were not in that spot.
And they aren’t fancy stats, I don’t deal as much in fancy stats as some others here do. Some are relevant and some aren’t. Many of them can completely contradict each other, example you can find some advanced metrics that said Alex Turcotte was good in the NHL last year and some that say he was terrible. Hockey is very luck oriented and I don’t believe enough of the advanced stats, outside of PDO really account for that, but I think PDO can be a bit over the top many times. So no you won’t see me talking about all the ABCDEFG metrics.
I bet sports for a living using statistical model/analysis I or others created and use. For the NHL I use more traditional stats some of which I already mentioned for teams and players, and I try and factor in potential trends about the league (last year being very high scoring was exploited by many in-season bettors before the books caught on). This year I expect a small dip from last years scoring totals due to improved defenses from
A handful of teams and overall better health from goaltenders and defenders. But not a return to what it was a few years ago and certainly not a return to what itwas a decade ago. The NHL (and all the other sports) know that people want offense, speed and fast play and that is not going away because low-scoring grinding hockey is a turn off to casual fans. I get crap here for hyping up skating and to some extent skill above all else, but that is where the league is going. This is not a slow players league, you have to be able to skate in the modern NHL. If you want to know why a man who won 2 Stanley Cup’s 10 and 8 years ago can’t find work look no further than that. DL hockey is dead and it’s never coming back, and the people making the decisions for teams know it.
I don’t believe I am any smarter than anyone else and have had plenty of losing seasons in the various sports leagues. But I do put in a lot of research and believe statistics and historical precedent completely trump some of the ways that others choose to look at the team. I think fans get to married to their own players and prospects and it causes an inability to see troubling things about said players. But in fairness to Blake I think he did see those troubling things with some players and it caused him to go in a different way (even if I disagree with the way)
And I was not trying to dump on last years Kings. As I’ve said numerous times the goal last year was clearly the playoffs and they achieved that goal and Blake and TM deserve a ton of credit for setting a goal and achieving it.
But you can certainly challenge the choices made if you are playing the long-game, which many here are as this forum is filled with fans who have been here for 10-15-20 years and don’t need instant gratification. I think most here would be fine with 3-4 more years of sucking if it meant 6 years of SC contention.
But using the historical thing again (sorry) it’s just extremely uncommon for teams in the modern NHL to have sustained success without drafting and developing multiple star to superstar caliber players. If the goal is to be the early 00’s Kings and be a perennial playoff team who maybe scares a high end team in the playoffs, then nothing wrong with Blake’s construction. But I just don’t see how the Kings are going to build a Stanley Cup caliber team, which should be the goal. And the most proven way to do that is to hit your draft picks out of the park.
For the Kings picks, the league trended away from one high pick the same way MLB went away from singles hitters and the NFL went away from plodding running backs, another high pick was just a statistical failure, not a bad player but not a foundational piece you need to have from that spot if you are going to transition to a contender as soon as the Kings did. So that leaves you with 2-3 players at the start of the transition to trying to contend who **MIGHT** be stars. A center with 6 games NHL experience, a winger with 1 game and a defenseman with 0. This is just so much different from the previous LA transition out of rebuild which whether you think it happened with Ryan Smyth or with Mike Richards, it happened with young players who had already developed into star players. The same was true in Tampa, Pittsburgh and Chicago, that makes up the four most successful teams of the post lockout, with Colorado (another team who drafted and developed multiple stars ready to join)
With the poor ROI on two key-picks the Kings would have increased their chances of winning a SC in this decade by bottoming out last year and this year and trying to accumulate more picks that hopefully could return better value than the previous ones while also letting QB, a player with star potential develop in a situation more conducive to development, which certainly last year was not. In addition you add two more high picks which increase your chances of adding star players that are basically a requirement for being a contender.
I understand you value the business side of it (which is a very valid take) and were eager for a return to meaningful games in LA for the first time in 6-7 years. I get that. I am just saying for those who value winning a championship there just isn’t very much historical evidence of a team ever being built this way and producing a Stanley Cup caliber return.
