If that’s what you truly believe, then what’s with all the hand wringing about managements plan post-Kopitar? In your eyes, we’ve got a future #1 center, a former #1 center, and several 3/4C types.
We’ll see.
#2 and #3 Centers are pretty important. Turcotte is still battling to be a full time NHL player. Nobody should be penciling him in for anything beyond next season.
I def recognize the importance of 2 and 3C. It’s what my ears perked when I heard rumblings about Kadri, although he’s already 34, so there’s no telling how his game looks 2-3 seasons from now. We can only hope that Kopitar continues with a couple of 1 year extensions ‘when’ Byfield truly ascends to a full fledged #1 guy. We all know 1C is like hunting a unicorn, even when you go have top 5 picks. Otherwise, you just hope to land very strong 2/3c type players with your 1st rounders, and no doubt, the Kings thought they had done just that in our 2019 and 2020 drafts.
Well the Kings did have a plan for a long term option for their #2C PL Dubois. Blake blew his load on that trade and that contract extension. Only problem was the player. lol.
I’ll be honest, I had completely forgotten about that.. but it stands to my point, that management was definitely aware of tending diligently to the center position, and was not negligent. Drafting Byfield and Turcotte should have taken care of 1C and 2C, with the trade for PLD bolstering/insuring the 2C. My point being, you could blame them for the misstep with PLD, but at the time it felt like a reasonable gamble. Given all that, it looked like things were lining up quite nicely down the center.. alas, various things have conspired to undermine those efforts.
But if the Kings believed they had a L1 and L2 Center in Byfield and Turcotte, why would they have traded for PLD? Reality is, L1/L2 centers are very difficult to come by in the league, and teams pay a high premium to get them. If every Center prospect drafted within the top 10 turned into one, this would not be the case.
Seems likely Holland will have to find the long term answer for C #2 in the trade market. My guess is he'll target Pavel Zacha. Zacha is 28. He has the size Holland loves. He's signed through 26-27 @ 4.75M. He can play a strong 2-way game. Most importantly Boston is at the crossroads of rebuilding or re-tooling so they could make him available before he hits free agency.
I heard some people say worst defenseman in the league. Which is a bit hyperbolic, I think.
His underlying analytics are bottom 5 in the league. Edmundson is something like bottom 20.
Not making a comparison between their abilities but this version of the Kings team needed a Ceci more than they needed a Spence.
This was certainly something I was going to chime in about earlier today before I got distracted by the debate over our center depth. If all we are asking Ceci to do is eat a puck down low in the corners until forward help arrives to break out.. will he do a better job than Jordan Spence? I’m not sure how all the advanced stats like Corsi play into that, but if that’s literally his one job, before he frees the puck up to a forward and gets his ass off the ice, I honestly don’t care if he’s involved in scoring plays. We got very little offense from our defensive corps anyways, and that’s what all these media pundits fail to realize. Simply because they probably couldn’t be bothered to watch any Kings games, anyways. So I could care less what Shayna Goldman or Dom lyzyzyzyzn says. In my opinion, those dipshits know less about hockey than the majority of the posters here in this forum. Deano’s statement above about edmundson being bottom 20 in the league is a matter of curiosity to me, and further begs the question of just how important those stats are to defenders of this ilk. Joel had 20 points in 73 games, and was a +25!! That seems pretty decent for a 4 million dollar defender that everyone claims is washed up.
When it comes to Ceci, I’m going to make my judgement when I actually see him on the ice. It’s not even worth watching YouTube videos since a lot of that stuff is cherry picked.
We all wondered that question.
To answer both you and DryKing, I think management had begun to question exactly what they were going to get with Byfield and Turcotte. I do think the early prognostication was a 1c/2c result, but Turcotte’s set backs from injury, and byfield’s slow development(and injury plus illness) left the team with some question marks about if/when. Thus, the PLD trade was made to fortify that position, should Byfield take several more years to emerge as a true #1. Especially with the potential for Kopitar retiring soonish, and Turcotte not establishing himself as a full time NHL center. So they opted to hedge their bets and roll the dice on PLD, who, like Byfield, vacillates between looking like a 1C and a 2C.
This is a good point and why a trade to enhance our backend corps is still needed. Spence was a jack of all trades and with that one of the better offensive defensemen on our team (which illustrates how low the bar has been). By moving him and replacing him/Gav with two defensive defenseman it compounds the problem even more.
