Player development is a complicated thing. There’s no one right answer, but there are ways to maximize your young talent and ways to minimize them.
There’s always risk involved but the high-risk, high-reward option is one that the Los Angeles Kings front office has only recently been willing to dabble with.
The low-risk, low-reward option is sticking your prospects in the bottom six and letting them play a role that redefines and reduces their skill set. A first-round draft pick is rarely drafted to become the best third—and fourth-line winger or center in the league. Even players who become that, see Trevor Lewis, aren’t drafted with that in mind.
Top prospects should be players in the top six. It’s just that simple. The Kings have made plenty of mistakes under the Rob Blake and Luc Robitaille, and one of them has been playing their top-end prospects in the bottom six.
Rasmus Kupari was and is a talented, speedy forward with size. He was a first-round draft pick and was buried in the Kings’ bottom six. He gained trust over time and ended up as a penalty killer while trying to learn the center role at the NHL level.
The young Finn showed flashes of brilliance, but there were also lapses where he looked to be skating faster than his ability to process the game. The first-round draft pick was caved in during the playoffs, providing the Kings with a lack of depth they had been coveting to get through past round one. The newfound Jet could not breach the first round with his new team.
Then there’s Arthur Kaliyev. Kaliyev became the best goal-scoring talent the organization had drafted since Tyler Toffoli, except there was exceptionally more hype about his goal-scoring ability. Kaliyev dominated the OHL in his draft and D+1 seasons. He also was fortunate to get the opportunity to play in the AHL underage through the COVID-19 playing loophole.
He scored on his debut in the NHL and looked to be the future top-line scoring winger of the future. But with the vast majority of his time spent in the bottom six, particularly the fourth line, he floundered. Kaliyev currently has 35 goals in 188 games. Seventeen of those goals came via the power play.
Kaliyev never got full-time status in the top six. His shot and talent kept him as a fixture in the power play unit alone, until last season when the relationship between player and team reached a boiling point.
His ability to put the puck in the back of the net was never in question. It was his defensive warts. They knew that…