Value of: Quinton Byfield

[Kurrilino]

Crosby is only an 82pt player average player then

Tyler Seguin is only a 52pt player then

MacKinnon is only an 82pt player for his career then, right?

Do you see how stupid it is to ignore lockout/covid shortened seasons and injury seasons as their “career average” or are you still choosing to die on this hill?

Which is 20 points better than Kopitar.
Seguin is like Kopitar not a 1st line center if it comes to being competitive in the NHL.
Just being a 1st line center because the team doesn't have someone better doesn't mean you are a NHL 1st line center.

 

[BigDaddyLurch]

Which is 20 points better than Kopitar.
Seguin is like Kopitar not a 1st line center if it comes to being competitive in the NHL.
Just being a 1st line center because the team doesn't have someone better doesn't mean you are a NHL 1st line center.

 

[nbwingsfan]

Which is 20 points better than Kopitar.
Seguin is like Kopitar not a 1st line center if it comes to being competitive in the NHL.
Just being a 1st line center because the team doesn't have someone better doesn't mean you are a NHL 1st line center.

This is mind boggling.

Do you or do you not consider both MacKinnon and Crosby to be 82pt players over their career? Yes or no?

Were there only two 1st line Cs in the entire league in 15/16 going by your standard of “must be PPG to be a 1st line player”? Yes or no?

Did the Kings win two cups with Kopitar as their #1C? Yes or no?

Very excited to hear your next response to these questions.

 

[Rorschach]

You must be kidding or not watching the Kings playoff.

I'm talking about career, not right this moment. Also, the last several years of playoffs have all been against the same team and you can't expect Kopitar to shut down McDavid AND Draisaitl at the same time.

 

[Frolov 6'3]

Kopitar is a Hall of Famer due to his nationality and longevity, not his peak level performance - which was consistently very good, but never "great".

Having a #1 center choosing defensive responsibility over offense for nearly 20 years only works when your team is loaded with depth. When it isn't - and it hasn't been for all but 3 years of his career - it's as much of a curse as a blessing.

Pure Gold !

Why would LA trade Byfield?

He wasnt very good @ any WJC. I have been told.

 

[NikF]

Where did I say that?

He is going in because he is the first Slovenian impact player, which is a major accomplishment, his incredible longevity of consistent, very good hockey, and the major contribution to two Cups. He is NOT going in based on being a superlative offensive player or a catalyst. This is not a "star" - he is habitually labeled as underrated because he simply never qualified for those things people "rate".

And that's all nonsense anyway. Any team would have been better off for having him, but there is a laundry list of issues he has presented that have done actual harm to the team.

Its all well and good to play matchup hockey with the likes of Thornton, Sedin and Getzlaf, but you simply do not need to err on the side of defense when you are up against Langkows, Hanzals, Backes' and the like. The Kings have long suffered from offensive ineptitude because their best offensive player wouldn't push the pace or alter his game at all when they needed offense. Anze has NEVER adapted his game to the changing style of the sport, he has willingly stayed in 3rd gear.

No opposition has ever had to change their tactics to face Kopitar because they knew that the Kings best offensive weapon was going to focus on defense. It has continually allowed teams to use their shutdown lines and pairs against the Kings secondary offensive units and it just squashed them for years.

All those seasons of poor playoff matchups, low seedings without home ice, all that could have been avoided if Kopitar pushed for 90 points instead of accepting high 60s and saw wven slightly better regular season success. He had the ability and chose not to use it. He cheated for defense over offense. Sure, it's more noble, but its still cheating an aspect of the game that the Kings were so poor at for soon long. He has been the best player on a niche team for a long time, got comfortable, and never gave more when needed.

His famous quote is "when everyone is good, no one has to be great", which is fantastic when you have Williams Richards, Carter, Brown and Gaborik. But when everyone isn't good, and you DO need your best to be great to succeed, Anze never once stepped up. He stayed at the same, consistently very good, solid level.

He AND the team would have been better off if he tried harder and burned out at 35 instead of holding back and still being a middle of the pack first line center for this long.

This has to be tackled because the feeling I get is once Kopitar retires there will be continued revisionist history being peddled about his career by a group of vocal minority who has some sort of personal dislike for him dating back to discussions that took place on the Kings LGK forum.

Funnily enough, I still remember being told there by a prominent poster that the Kings will never win the Cup if Brayden Schenn doesn't supplant Kopitar as the number one center. Funny how that turned out. Yet this strand of Kopitar criticism persists through all of his accomplishments and I am almost certain as he retires, the revisionist history will go into overload-mode.

1. To claim that Kopitar is going into HOF because he is Slovenian is a ridiculous notion. It is disingenuous, especially listening it as first in a list of his accomplishments. If anything he would be more highly regarded if he was Canadian or had played in a more prominent market. To list it as first among his accomplishments (or at all) reeks of bad faith argument.

2. Kopitar was never primarily a two-way player until he became a Los Angeles King, specifically under Terry Murray. He has always been a responsible, detail-oriented player, but this is the first time I hear this being held against a player. He hasn't been as defensively oriented player under Crawford or in the last few years either. At this point, he does not play as low in his defensive zone, spends less time matching up 1 on 1 in defending players and even displays more freedom and risk in offensive situations now than he did at his peak. The problem is he is very, very old and the pace and skating do not allow him to have players strapped on his back while keeping possesion anymore. If he didn't change his style of play to a less defensively intense, more offensively opportunistic version, he would have been out of the league already. The reason he has the longevity is because he is big, durable, very smart and very skilled. And because he *did* adjust.

3. The Kings never scored a lot because that is the way the team has been designed by Dean Lombardi. He and his coaching staff prioritized checking, puck possesion and tight 5 man unit play. Despite that, Kopitar has virtually always outscored his teammates, often by a lot. Dean Lombardi then tried this same team construction philosophy again in that famous team USA failure. This was Dean Lombardi hockey, not Anze Kopitar hockey. The team was never constructed for regular season success either and this again is Dean Lombardi not Anze Kopitar.

4. Kopitar never had a lot of offensive deception in his game nor was he ever a spectacular skater. He did not have the 1 on 1 ability to make things happen out of nothing consistently. He was never Malkin. There's a difference between being a great technical player and having the ability to pull stuff out of your ass consistently. People blame Kopitar for playing the game that management wanted to play and then blame him for not being Malkin. Kopitar never "chose" anything or "cheated" about a part of his game. That is a ridiculous notion.

5. Not going to even bother with the ridiculous match-up thesis. Yes teams loved having their #1 offensive weapon neutured by Kopitar in match-ups while Kopitar churned along his usual PPG pace, instead they just loved using their shutdown pairs on the real Kings threats, all of whom Kopitar outscored virtually every time in regular season or playoffs. Teams really feared the Tanner Pearsons of the world or Mike Richards on his last fumes.

6. You conveniently place every problem with the Kings at the foot of Kopitar but virtually ignore every strength of the Kings as being primarily associated with him. The suffocating, consistent, steady machine that played the same way no matter the result? That often neutered other teams while still getting their 3 goals a game? Kopitar has nothing to do with that. When something is wrong with the team it's because Kopitar doesn't push himself, when something is right it's the support players who get the credit.

7. Outside of Crosby, Kopitar has consistently had probably the worst offensive supporting cast compared to his #1C contemporaries on contenders. Richards was past his prime for the majority of his Kings stay and could no longer be expected to carry a significant offensive burden despite the sporadic big moment he provided which was admittedly very valuable. Toffoli and Pearson especially are nothing to write home about. Brown is a mid player whose career can largely be derived from being attached to Kopitar's hip. Carter and Williams were about what you would expect, good. Gaborik was a finished player who squeezed one last large contract out of a good playoff run. Dustin Penner was nothing much to write about.

Malkin, Hossa, Zetterberg, Patrick Kane, Kucherov, Marchand, Stamkos, Mark Stone, Pastrnak, Corey Perry... I could go on but all of those forwards are superior to anything Kopitar ever played with. It is a bit easier to come up in the big moments opportunistically when you don't shoulder the entire offensive load all season long while playing Selke-level defense. But I would never denigrate the Kings supporting cast because they provided the right elements the team needed to win - in part because Kopitar could and *did* shoulder the vast majority of the team's offensive load for 82 regular season + playoffs while mitigating opposition's best players. So I see no reason to denigrate part of an equation that was clearly working as a whole.

8. There is no "famous quote" by Kopitar. Most players do not think 2 minutes about what they will say to press outside of what seems like good PR. The quote became famous because it has been mined to feed Kopitar criticism and because, out of context, it fits the criticism some people throw his way.

I think there is a a grain of truth to the fact that yes, Kopitar could have played more agressive at times and abandon the good soldier role at critical junctures, but this gets largely blown out into apocalyptical proportions and the sense I get is that it will post-retirement devolve into pure historical revisionism. It is unfortunate in a sense that he did not retire closer to his peak because his value immediately post-retirement would have been more obvious than it will be now. It is also unfortunate that he is now "guilty" for Blake's inability to construct a team or that Byfield and Turcotte are closer to Kaapo Kakko and Kirby Dach than to Stutzle and Seider. If the best route for the Kings to take was trading Kopitar at some point, it's the GM's problem for not trading him.

And for the record, I do not think the Kings win a single Cup with Toews or Bergeron in place of Kopitar. I don't think they would carry the offense for 100 games in a season as the main offensive *and* defensive weapon with that supporting cast, where there is nowhere to hide offensively. But this precise thing is paradoxically held against Kopitar, when he should be applauded for carrying an immense two-way and usage weight, which was probably *the* heaviest weight among his contemporaries.

 

[kingsfan2012]

@mods please close this thread it’s been hijacked