Marner Watch

Unfortunate? Many people were saying he’s so small and soft he surely won’t be a factor come playoff time. Kings should have no problem getting past Vegas now!

Eichel may not be McPrincess and Marner isn't Crysaddle either but those two will likely still give us problems in the regular season if the Kings are trying to make it to the playoffs again. Let's not get too ahead of ourselves. And we know Vegas loves to swing for the fences when it comes to big name players in the market.
 
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I'm not surprised. And I'm actually one of the few here who didn't want him (Marner) in our team. Well, the unfortunate thing is that now the Kings have to deal with both him and Eichel, not just McOverrated and Crysaddle.
That's another reason you want him on our team & not our division rival.
 
At one point Kings were ranked 1, 1, and 2 overall for their prospect pool. Not all will work out, but clearly a few Blake was counting on simply didn’t. Kaliyev and Bjornfot are the big ones, and you can put Turcotte and Thomas in their own category of disappointment.

Bigger issue is he failed to trade assets. Vegas has used assets for trades that have really panned out. So has Colorado. Blake made one successful trade using a prospect chip and that was Fiala. That he could never parlay any of these pieces into more help on the left side is malpractice.
This is the problem. It's not drafting. That's fine. It's mismanaging assets. You can't put every drafted player in the lineup. So you have to turn these picks & prospects into something. And the Kings haven't in the way that Florida or Vegas has.

I don't know if there's a draft expert out there who's figured out what the percentages of draft picks from each round become successful NHL players, like 1st round is X%, 2nd round is Y%, etc. I imagine the Kings are more successful in later rounds than earlier ones. Then once you know that can you look what we got for them or didn't get? And then see if we're more or less successful based on those percentages? For example, would losing Johnny Brodzinski or Dominik Kubalik matter more if they were early rather than late round picks? Or is losing them bad no mater what? Someone smarter than me who's got more time should figure that out.
 
You've got it backwards. If he's traded to Vegas, as he's expected to be today, there'll be no tampering charge because TO won't file a complaint. And even if the trade falls through, they wouldn't lose Marner, they may lose a pick or two. So this thread can be renamed "Watch Marner go to Vegas."
I wonder if another team could file tampering charges, or even the league itself start an investigation? Or does it have to be the team that lost him? But doesn't it seem like trading Nic Roy to Toronto for Marner is like slipping $100 to a traffic cop so he won't write you a speeding ticket?
 
Missing on the #5 pick is not a big deal in and of itself. (Lombardi missed at #4 in ‘07 @ #13 in ‘08) My broader point was missing consistently in Rounds 1 & 2 which happened a lot under Blake puts the team behind the 8 ball in terms of assets. The league standard rate at which 1st and 2nd round picks become NHLers is significantly greater than rounds 3-7.

Dwindling assets is why the Kings are where they’re at today in terms of prospect pool and 4 consecutive years of being bounced in the 1st round of the playoffs.

At one point Kings were ranked 1, 1, and 2 overall for their prospect pool. Not all will work out, but clearly a few Blake was counting on simply didn’t. Kaliyev and Bjornfot are the big ones, and you can put Turcotte and Thomas in their own category of disappointment.

Bigger issue is he failed to trade assets. Vegas has used assets for trades that have really panned out. So has Colorado. Blake made one successful trade using a prospect chip and that was Fiala. That he could never parlay any of these pieces into more help on the left side is malpractice.


I agree about letting too many assets lose too much value/walk for nothing. But that is often a part of a (wannabe) contender teams/win-now approach. You have no/very little room to give them NHL time to develop their skills and showcase them, so...the only real alternative is trading them while they're still relatively fresh out of the draft. But how many of us would want that? We hated DL for doing just that in his later years - mortgaging the future for failed win-now attempts, despite the fact that he actually proved he CAN build a (multiple) Cup winner.

Besides, how many teams have proven this ruthless, loyalty-free, dumpster diving wheelin'-dealin' works as a way to get to the Cup? Vegas and Florida, really. That means there's 97% NHL GMs out there who don't know how to do that. And Vegas couldn't do it without LTIR cap circumvention either that will soon be (hopefully) impossible to pull off anymore.

And I've been saying Ken doesn't know how to do this wheelin' and dealin' any more than Rob does and it looks like he won't attract many more good UFAs either, so...yeah. Replacing Rob with Ken will most likely be pretty much a wash performance-wise (unless QB, Clarke take very big steps forward and Greentree slots right in as a 2nd line threat) and we can only hope he won't sacrifice MORE future than Rob did in the process of failing to build a winner in the short-term.
 
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