The Hockey News Archive
The Los Angeles Kings are intent on making a big splash this coming NHL season. And in this cover story from The Hockey News’ Nov. 2, 2021, edition (Volume 75, Issue 6), writer Ken Campbell profiled the Kings’ youngsters as GM Rob Blake built the roster into what it is today.
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When the story was published, Blake slowly but surely added youngsters to the organization, including Jaret Anderson-Dolan, Quinton Byfield, Brandt Clarke and Rasmus Kupari. Blake has since moved on from Anderson-Dolan and Kupari, but the rebuilding philosophy behind the slow and painful process was clear to Kings employees.
“You can’t be half pregnant, if you know what I mean,” said Kings director of amateur scouting Mark Yannetti. “You see teams that are half in and say they’re rebuilding and then they go and trade a bunch of picks. The big thing is (Blake) was committed to a rebuild and he stuck to it.”
Los Angeles made a slew of moves this summer to make the Kings harder to play against, including adding forwards Tanner Jeannot, Warren Foegele and Joel Edmundson. But with Byfield and Clarke carving out NHL careers for themselves, the toughest years are over for the Kings regarding finding young players.
Here’s the full original story:
BACK TO THE FUTURE
Vol. 75, No. 6, Nov. 2, 2021
By Ken Campbell
Jaret Anderson-Dolan won 86 faceoffs at the Staples Center last season. And each time he did, Jarret Stoll would allow himself to smile, and perhaps puff out his chest a little like a proud father. Because with each of those faceoff wins, Stoll gained some validation in the knowledge that his Jarret-on-Jaret tutelage was paying off.
“I’d be watching from the press box and to see him win a key faceoff and to win it the way you taught him to win it, that’s what really pumps you up and gets you excited,” Stoll said. “Of course, I was really happy for him, but I was also thinking that all these things that I was teaching and preaching were actually working.”
The Los Angeles Kings have missed the playoffs four of the past five seasons, and the one time they made it, they were swept in four straight by an expansion team. But they do have those two Stanley Cup banners, so there’s that.
Those championships, as they always do, came with a price. And they paid in cash. It’s been seven years since the Kings won the Stanley Cup and, in all likelihood, it will be eight after this season.
While they aren’t quite out of the woods in their period of reckoning, there is every reason to believe that good days are ahead. Very good days. If you’re in the business of grading prospect lists, L.A.’s group of young players is probably in your top three. It might even be No. 1. The Kings really like their group of futures, and so do a lot of other people.
But it’s not just drafting that has vaulted the Kings to where they are. Truth be told, part of the reason their prospect list is so good is because the team itself was so bad that it put the organization in a position to draft Alex Turcotte fifth, Quinton Byfield second and Brandt Clarke eighth in three successive years. Anybody can do that. But where the Kings have really focused their efforts is on development, which brings us back to Stoll working the dots with Anderson-Dolan.
When director of player personnel Nelson Emerson was on a scouting trip in Canada in mid-October, former Kings Matt Greene and Sean O’Donnell were essentially holding a mini development camp with defenseman Helge Grans, a Swedish prospect who converted from being a forward at 15. Former King Glen Murray, who became the Kings’ director of development in 2018, has Stoll and Mike Donnelly working with the forwards, while Greene and O’Donnell tend to the defensemen.
It helps, of course, that both the Kings and their AHL affiliate, the Ontario Reign, practice and do all their development work out of the Toyota Sports Performance Center in El Segundo. On a typical day when the Kings are in town, they take the ice at about 11 a.m., then the Reign follow at 1 p.m.
It’s important to note that most those former Kings, including Emerson and GM Rob Blake, were brought in by former GM Dean Lombardi, one of the great development minds in the history of the game. When he ran the Kings’ hockey operations department, Lombardi was always angling for an edge and he found it in development. As an astute observer of baseball, he reasoned that the same approach to development could be used in hockey.
Lombardi believed ardently that baseball players got better by repetition in one area of the game. Sometimes his initiatives cost money, but he always reasoned that it was money well spent. Others were demanding, to the point where some of his practices would prompt a Spockian eyebrow raise from the league. But his focus on development led him to hire all those former Kings to develop players and to do it in a way that is very specific.
Much of Stoll’s mandate, for example, is teaching the Kings’ prospects and young players how to win faceoffs and play in the defensive zone. He gets them when they’re essentially clueless, as almost all young players are when it comes to knowing what it takes to play in the best league in the world.
It was that way with Akil Thomas, a player Stoll said “was really out of his element” after he was drafted, but has made enormous progress and likely would have played in the NHL last year if his season had not been cut short by injury.
“It’s actually really shocking how little most of these guys know about playing in the defensive zone,” Stoll said. “They need a lot of work.”
And they get it now that the Kings’ minor pro affiliate is on the other side of the same building rather than the other side of the country. Lombardi was key to developing the plan the Kings use and, like it did when they developed the likes of Tyler Toffoli, Alec Martinez, Jake Muzzin, Dwight King and Jordan Nolan prior to their Cup years, they’re hoping it bears similar results.
“(Lombardi) taught us all about that approach,” Emerson said. “Dean really made us believe that a player in the NHL can’t be good until he’s gone through this process. We all took so much from him and even today, when you see things that happen in a game, you think about what he might have said about it in some conversation you had one time.”
The Kings are where they are because of the strength of their drafts from 2017, when Blake took over the GM’s job from Lombardi. In the five drafts Blake has presided over, director of amateur scouting Mark Yannetti has had a total of 36 swings and delivered a treasure trove of young players from stars to role players.
Actually, the Kings’ journey the past decade is an interesting case study in how teams go from rebuilding to a contender – and back to rebuilding. It works out when you’re the Kings or the Pittsburgh Penguins or the Chicago Blackhawks when you can look at those Stanley Cup banners during the hard times.
When you’re trying to win now, the combination of trading futures and salary-cap constraints puts almost every legitimate Cup contender in the same bind. In the case of the Kings, Blackhawks and Penguins, it worked out brilliantly. The San Jose Sharks and Nashville Predators (and possibly the Vegas Golden Knights and Toronto Maple Leafs in a few years)? Not so much.
“You can’t be half pregnant, if you know what I mean,” Yannetti said. “You see teams that are half in and say they’re rebuilding and then they go and trade a bunch of picks. The big thing is Rob was committed to a rebuild and he stuck to it. We lost to Vegas four straight, but each game was an overtime or one-goal game. That year we thought we were a contender and when we realized we weren’t…you’ve got (Anze) Kopitar and (Drew) Doughty and (Jonathan) Quick and it wasn’t easy to commit to a rebuild.”
The Kings’ rise and fall of their team, and their prospect list, can be easily tracked by looking at THN’s annual Future Watch issue.
In 2011, the Kings ranked No. 2 overall in our rankings of each team’s 21-and-under prospects. They dropped to No. 22 in 2012, the year they hoisted their first Cup. The Kings remained serious Cup contenders for the next four years, but they also had a string of years between 2013 and 2019 where they finished between 25th and 29th in Future Watch. They moved up to 13th in 2020 and were third in 2021. And perhaps there is no player who embodies that trajectory upward, then downward, then back upward, than Jeff Carter.
Four days before the 2012 trade deadline, the Kings were holding down the eighth and final playoff spot in the Western Conference, with the Dallas Stars, Calgary Flames, Colorado Avalanche and Minnesota Wild breathing down their necks. But they knew they were much better. Their play was picking up under new coach Darryl Sutter and they were establishing a team identity that would later be replicated around the league. They had good homegrown players in Kopitar, Doughty, Quick and Martinez, among others.
That was when they picked up Carter, who had been dealt to Columbus from Philadelphia for Jakub Voracek and was not happy about it. The Kings gave up Jack Johnson and a first-round pick to get Carter, the same player they dealt to Pittsburgh nine years later in the midst of their own rebuild, for third- and fourth-round picks.
The Kings have used those picks to stock their organization, but they’ve also leveraged them as draft capital to move up and get players they want in later rounds.
A perfect example of that was the 2021 draft. You look at that Kings draft and see they had only four picks, which seems counterintuitive when your mandate is to rebuild. But the Kings actually went into that draft with seven picks, including their first-rounder, which they used on defenseman Clarke at eighth overall. But each of their next three selections – Francesco Pinelli, Samuel Helenius and Kirill Kirsanov – were acquired when the Kings used their surplus picks to move up in the draft.
They did the same thing in 2020 when they dealt the 51st and 97th overall picks in the draft to Detroit to move up six spots to take highly regarded University of Minnesota defenseman Brock Faber 45th overall.
“We have enough prospects, right?” Emerson said. “So in this year’s draft, we didn’t want to get quantity. We tried to get quality because we had our eyes on some guys.”
So an organization that had experienced a ton of success became bereft of draft picks and young players and faced a time of reckoning. It was time to restock the organization with both picks and young players and the Kings did just that, trading away veterans Toffoli, Martinez, Muzzin and Kyle Clifford, all for futures.
As it stands in 2021-22, the Kings are at that point in the cycle where the young players in the rebuild are beginning to work their way into the lineup. Tobias Bjornfot and Arthur Kaliyev, who were drafted in 2019, were on the opening-day roster, and 2018 pick Rasmus Kupari was called up after the first game. Byfield and Thomas almost certainly would have also been there if not for injuries. But the Kings are also mindful that they want their prospects to truly be ready to play by the time they come to the NHL for good.
That’s part of the reason they overpaid to sign Phillip Danault in the summer. With him in the lineup, that means they don’t have to rush Turcotte, the No. 5 overall pick in 2019. And Anderson-Dolan, who played 34 games and was with the Kings for the entire season in 2020-21, started this year back in the AHL, with the thought being that once he does return to the NHL, he’ll do so as a player who is truly ready to play game-in and game-out against the best players in the world. It’s about putting your prospects into situations where they can succeed.
Whether or not they ultimately will is still in the process of being played out. Like every other organization in the NHL, the Kings will not hit on all their picks because that is impossible. But when you approach a rebuild the way they have, you give yourself every possible opportunity to succeed. It may result in a return to the glory days of 2012 and 2014. It may fall short. Anyone who has been in the game long enough will tell you that all you can do is set yourself up to be a perennially contending team for a stretch of about five years and hope that things fall your way once the puck drops for the playoffs. And the only way you can do that is by building and rebuilding, the way the Kings have.
When L.A. was in its heyday and trying to stay among the NHL’s elite, the team traded four first-round picks in seven years. The result was predictable. But now that the Kings have turned the corner on restocking their organization, they’re excited about what is on the way.
And for Yannetti, the first indication of that came at this year’s rookie camp.
“Our development staff is brutally honest and we had a couple of really lean years at development camp,” Yannetti said. “For the first time in a while, they’re excited. They can’t wait to work with these guys and that’s something you can’t fake.”
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