Moving down the list, we continue our series dissecting The Athletic’s fan poll determining fan confidence in NHL front office’s where the Los Angeles Kings ranked 31st.
We’ve already looked at roster building and visions, now we’re moving to draft and development.
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Related:
Kings Fans Lack of Front Office Confidence: Roster Building
Kings Fans Warranted in Their Lack of Confidence in Front Offices’ Vision
I want to make the caveat that I don’t like combining drafting and developing into one category. They’re two separate things handled by different departments within the organization and their success shouldn’t be determined together.
However, that’s how The Athletic has it. I get why, it’s easy, but not ideal.
Since taking over in 2017, the Rob Blake-led Kings have drafted 52 players, 18 of which came in the first two rounds of the draft.
We’ll use those 52 players to judge Blake’s drafting and development, you could argue players drafted a few years before should fall under developing for Blake but that gets too complicated.
Using that 2017 cutoff, let’s look at next season’s roster. Akil Thomas Alex Laferriere, Alex Turcotte, Brandt Clarke, Jordan Spence and Quinton Byfield are all expected to be NHL regulars next season with Arthur Kaliyev and Samuel Fagemo having a chance to make the team.
Of that group, Anderson, Byfield, one of Clarke and Spence, and Laferriere are expected to play a significant role on that team.
It’s fair to exclude the last two drafts when looking at help for next season, so out of 43 picks (2017-22), the Kings have extracted six full-time NHLers and four playing a significant role for their team.
If we want to be generous we can bump that to eight and 10 if we include Gabe Vilardi and Brock Faber being significant players for other teams.
It isn’t a terrible return but isn’t great either when you factor in how many of those players were selected in the top two rounds.
Amongst that group of 14 players, there’s a realistic world where Byfield is the only player in a top-six or top-four role. That’s a bad return. Again, you can argue for three players if we include Vilardi and Faber.
This is where I think we need to separate drafting and developing. Is the lack of impact from those players the fault of the scouting department or development staff?
Let’s get even more complicated here, I think it’s the fault of neither.
Where the Kings have really stumbled in their use of young players is in…