Draft Day, Insiders!
So what can you expect from the LA Kings?
There are two worlds at play here.
World 1 is the one the Kings are preparing and planning for and that’s the NHL Draft. Led by Director of Amateur Scouting Mark Yannetti, the Kings have the 17th overall pick in today’s first round, the highest draft pick they’ve had since selecting Brandt Clarke in 2021. With that pick, barring anything crazy, the Kings will add a new skater prospect at the top of their pool.
It’s a prospect pool that has thinned out at the top over the years, due to NHL graduations and trades made in an effort to improve the NHL roster. The Kings are stacked in net, with two of the NHL’s top goaltending prospects, and adding players like Henry Brzustewicz and Vojtech Cihar at last season’s draft certainly helped. But when you look around the league, the Kings don’t have nearly as many top-end caliber of players as other organizations. They should be able to add one at 17.
“I think there’s some real substance of four or five players at 17, so I think it’s a good pick. I think your expectation should be a top-six forward or a top-four D there. I don’t think there’s an expectation of a goalie in this year’s draft there, there’s some good goalies, but I don’t think it’s there. I think there’s a tier of four or five guys at 17 that are good and not just players that will end up playing.”
I like that last line. Not just players that will end up playing. Yannetti spoke on All The Kings Men last week about the notion of a 200-game evaluation for draft picks and why he likes that evaluation, just not for first-round picks. When you pick in Round 1, you need to get guys who not just play but make an impact. That’s his hope and intention here, is to select a player who one day makes an impact.
When you look at the external rankings around that area, the players available certainly seem to trend towards forward over defenseman. You could look at it another way, though.
Most mock drafts have several defensemen being selected in the Top-10. The Athletic’s final mock draft, for example, has a run of six defensemen in a row, starting at Pick 3 and running through to Pick 9. TSN’s has six defensemen in an eight-pick range around the same area. Perhaps that’s just the makeup of this draft class. However, that’s a lot of teams in a row passing on forwards. All it takes are one or two of those teams to pivot and all of a sudden, the board changes.
As Yannetti said, the expectation at 17 is that once the player develops and reaches his potential in the NHL, you expect to be able to land a top-six forward or a top-four defenseman with that pick. In lower rounds, you target different types of outcomes. There’a ton of merit in picking a player with third-line upside and a higher floor later in the draft. In Round 1, though, you have look at higher-end upside and the Kings certainly need higher-end upside in their pool.
So, who will the Kings wind up picking? A look here at some projections around the hockey community via mock drafts, but ultimately that isn’t what it boils down to. The Kings have put in more than 12 months worth of work into this draft, finishing with in-person meetings in Los Angeles this week. With the draft remaining de-centralized for another year at least, the bulk of the Los Angeles contingent will be at Toyota Sports Performance Center today and tomorrow, gearing up and working together away from the draft floor. The bulk of the work was done prior to this week. This week was finishing touches and in-person conversations, which can sometimes lead to more definitive outcomes.
“If the job has been done right up to this point, there should not be revelations happening with major things,” Yannetti said. “Now, that doesn’t mean bigger moves don’t happen. There’s a timing of information, so with some of the Russian players that were not at the combine, because they were at a special camp, that took place in late June, so some of the information that is key to making a decision, you can’t possibly get until a latter stage. So, there are cases where there were bigger moves made in this meeting but it was dependent on information coming in later. I don’t know that there was a big move made on a player that was at the combine. There were some smaller moves based on the information. You’d see a lot of moves, but you’d see a lot of very minor moves, Player A going ahead of Player B, Player D going ahead of Player C, but you would seldom see Player M going ahead of Player B.”
Beyond that pick, the Kings currently have eight selections on Day 2 of the draft, including two second-round picks in the Top-50 overall. Again, it’s something they haven’t had in a while here. Each of the last two years, the formula was very simple. The Kings picked in the 20’s and did not have a second-round pick. They moved back in Round 1 and acquired a pick in Round 2. So, not only did they draft Liam Greentree and Henry Brzustewicz but they also added Carter George and Vojtech Cihar. When he spoke on All The Kings Men recently, Yannetti admitted his preference in a vacuum is always to move back. You win the value of a trade when you move back just about every time. The trade off is that you often run the risk of dropping a tier in your rankings when you do so.
With Greentree and Brzustewicz, the Kings held their tier while adding a second-round pick. One of those was carefree, the other had a lot of sweating involved. But they got a player in the same tier when trading back as they did if they stood pat. This year, there is no need to add a second-round pick because the Kings already have two. Sure, they could benefit from another swing, with all of the picks lost over the years, but they’ve already got two in a four-pick range. That factors in when it comes to this pick.
With that in mind, could we see the Kings trade up? Over the past five years, I’ve been privy to two scenarios where the Kings at least considered trading up in Round 1, in one way or another. And, by explore, it was certainly not anything very advanced or all that serious. But the scenarios were the same, where the Kings saw a player they had rated very highly slip into a potentially attainable range and that would be the scenario where it makes sense to move up. TLDR, you don’t move up to select your 12th ranked player at 14. You move up to select your fifth ranked player at 14.
“I think you should trade down, in a vacuum, in most years, that’s my philosophy, that doesn’t mean it’s anyone else’s. I like to trade down. That’s been magnified these last few years, because we’ve had five first-round picks and we only have two right now, we traded Greentree and we traded picks. In years past, I think we traded four out of seven, so a lot of times too it’s necessity. We have a shallow prospect pool, we have no picks because we’re trying to win so you trade back and you get an extra second. In the last three or four years, we’ve had no second, so we had to get a pick to get [Carter] George, we had to get a pick to get [Vojtech] Cihar. There was some necessity built into it, as well as it is my philosophy.”
Yannetti added that he believes trading up presents more of an opportunity than he’s had in years past, being at 17 versus in the 20’s, but at the same time, getting into the Top-10 requires a substantial haul, so you’re relying on players potentially falling. The Kings will be diligent as the board unfolds,
I said at the top that there are two worlds at play here and World 2 is one that we just cannot predict. The Kings have put in a ton of work on the amateur scouting side to be prepared for these two days. However, this isn’t the only goal at play here. Preparation has been to make nine picks, but what happens when Ken Holland makes a trade that either adds a pick or subtracts one? It happened last year to a lesser degree, when the Kings acquired a third-round pick they didn’t expect to have and they wound up trading down in that spot, netting future picks, which have now been shuffled around in a few different directions, resulting in the Kings still picking this year in Round 3, while also acquiring Artemi Panarin and moving out Warren Foegele.
With that in mind, though, I think there have been a couple of times in the past when the Kings have altered their preparation, knowing they wouldn’t have a first-round pick and they didn’t. This isn’t the case here. It’s possible that Ken Holland trade pick 17 an hour from now for an impact player. Could happen. In that case, it’ll be work that was done and not used, though, because World 1 is as prepared as World 1 can be, within their control.
Draft kicks off at 4 PM Pacific here on Day 1, Insiders! Will have a live thread / Q&A up around that time, running at least through the Kings make their pick! Hope to see many of you then.
