LA Kings: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

The NHL offseason kicked into high gear over the weekend, beginning with the NHL Entry Draft on Friday. For the LA Kings, they’ve so far made a pair of trades before signing three players on Monday when Free Agency opened up.

While there is plenty of time between now and the start of the season, the LA roster has largely taken shape. Here, we will take a look at some of the recent moves that General Manager Rob Blake has made.

The Good

Warren Foegele (UFA signing, 3 years, $3.5M AAV)

This was a really nice bit of business by Blake. After losing Viktor Arvidsson to the Edmonton Oilers, Foegele will fill a need in the LA Kings’ top nine.

The 28-year-old Foegele is an excellent skater who gives opposing defensemen a lot to handle on a forecheck. And given his speed – Foegele ranks in the 86th percentile among NHL skaters in Top Skating Speed and the 81st percentile in Speed Bursts Over 20 mph (Per NHL Edge) – he’s also dangerous off the rush.

Via All Three Zones

In addition, he’s a player who creates plenty of scoring chances, in large part due to his speed, but his skill is quite underrated in my opinion.

Via All Three Zones

While he may fit best in a middle-six slot, I can see him playing a similar role that Quinton Byfield played next to Anze Kopitar and Adrian Kempe on the team’s top line. His skating, forechecking, and playmaking are all good enough to be able to play there. Foegele notched his first 20-goal season in 2023-24, finishing the season with 20 goals and 21 assists. 37 of those 41 points came at 5-on-5.

Foegele may not be the true impact top-six scorer the team (still) needs, but he’s a very effective player and should prove to be a solid addition to the lineup.

The Bad

Tanner Jeannot (acquired via trade for a 2025 2nd-round pick and 2024 4th-round pick)

This is less about Jeannot and more about the overall situation. Jeannot on his own is….fine.

Going back a few years, Jeannot’s 2021-22 season was excellent – he scored 24 goals and added 17 assists in his first full season in the NHL. In the 131 games since then, he’s amassed a total of 13 goals and 19 assists (including just seven goals and 14 points this past season). So which is the real Tanner Jeannot? The 21-22 version, or what we’ve seen since.

If we peel back the curtain on the 21-22 season, it was very much an outlier. For starters, his shooting percentage was an unsustainable 19.4%. Not only that but when you look at his tracking data from All Three Zones from that great season, it was very underwhelming:

None of his chance-creation tracking graded out well at all, even in 21-22.

So what does he do well? Surely there’s a reason Blake traded two draft picks for him.

Well, he skates hard and is a very hard-to-play-against player. Among skaters with a minimum of ten games played, Jeannot ranked 19th in Hits/60. If Jeannot slots in on the fourth line and is a replacement for Trevor Lewis, I think you can do worse as he does bring an element that LA doesn’t have much of.

My problem with this is two-fold. First, I’ll believe it when I see it that he’s a Lewis replacement. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see Jeannot play on the team’s third line or worse. Neither of these situations is a good one. And second, the acquisition cost. A fourth-line player whose only dimension is his physical play should never cost a second-round (and a fourth-round) pick.

There’s an avenue for Jeannot, who has one year left at $2.67M, to be a perfectly adequate addition if played in the appropriate spot. But for a team that has given away draft picks like candy in recent years, paying a pick that could really come in handy at the March 2025 trade deadline is a head-scratcher.

The Ugly

Joel Edmundson (UFA signing, 4 years, $3.85M AAV)

I genuinely don’t know how to start this section so I’m just going to come out and say it: this signing is a fireable offense.

Objectively, Joel Edmundson has been among the worst defensemen in the NHL for quite a while now. Known as a defensive defenseman, Edmundson is not good at defense. Nor is he a good penalty killer.

Just because someone is 6’5″ doesn’t automatically make them good. We should have learned this by now. Let’s take a look at some of the reactions to this signing:

I’m not going to get into what the better options were for Blake to upgrade LD3 because the answer is “any of them”.

For all his flaws, the LA Kings were better off doing nothing and continuing with (gasp) Andreas Englund as their bottom-pair left defenseman. At the very least, Englund – or even the newly acquired Kyle Burroughs – doesn’t tie up $3.85 million for the next four years.

In addition to being completely ineffective at anything other than cross-checks, Edmundson has missed a lot of time due to injury. The 31-year-old has managed 60 games once in the past three seasons (61 in 2022-23).

 

I am trying to understand the purpose of this signing. If Rob Blake was looking for a big, physical, defensive defenseman he has that in Andreas Englund. I was as hard as anyone on Englund last season but I’m not convinced in the slightest that Edmundson is an upgrade. Particularly at a cap hit that’s $2.8M higher than Englund (and did I mention it’s a four-year deal)? Englund even had more Hits/60 and more Blocked Shots/60 than Edmundson.

It is unfathomable that a handsomly-paid NHL General Manager is willing to hand out a contract like this. When Elliotte Friedman reported that the LA Kings were interested in Edmundson, I assumed we were looking at a one-year or, at worst, two-year deal. In no universe did I expect a deal like this – a four-year deal – to come in for an oft-injured 31-year-old who hasn’t been a positive contributor for years.

Rob Blake has shown yet again he has no idea how to construct a defense corps to compete in the modern-day NHL.

While I’m very bullish on Warren Foegele, Monday was not a good day to be an LA Kings fan as their GM continues to sabotage his blueline.

We’ll see what other offseason moves will happen, but forgive me if I’m not confident.

 

Main Photo Credit: Sam Navarro, USA TODAY Sports

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5 thoughts on “LA Kings: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly”

  1. Well….. we did get tougher, but that shouldn’t have been the primary goal in this offseason. I think a primary goal should have been getting a proven 40+ goal scoring wing. It’s also is puzzling to me why our Hall of Fame GM struggles so hard to find the right pieces in the same position he played. Signing Edmunson should be a fireable offense, but if ownership didn’t fire Blake for the PLD debacle, they aren’t going to fire him for this blunder either. Another gripe I have is bringing back Trevor Lewis. All that means is we again will have aging vets taking away time from our more than capable youth. I wish Lewis would finish out his career being a mentor this year in Ontario and us just calling him up when there is an injury. So sick of our youth over-marinating in the AHL. It’s time for them to be full time NHL’rs and let each one determine if they will sink or swim. I just don’t know where we are getting goals from next year ? Hopefully our youth really make some strides and can be counted on for a big increase in our secondary scoring. But that seems to be putting a lot of hope in unproven commodities.

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  3. Hello to all,
    I am in Quebec City, Canada and have been a Kings fan forever. My Father took me to my first NHL game at the old Montreal Forum when I was young so we could see our favorite player Marcel Dionne. This gives you an idea how long I’ve been a fan.
    That said, just like alot of you, we waited a long time to see the Stanley Cup in L.A.
    With what I’ve seen in the years that followed 2012 and 2014, is a steady decline of the Kings and no urgency to fix it.
    The Blake era, which is still ongoing unfortunately, has been and is a disaster. To make it even worse, if possible, they hired Bergevin who single handedly ruined the Montreal Canadiens.
    After observing these two idiots at work on Free Agency Day, the both should be fired immediately. And I’m sorry Luc but you let this happen and your time is up as well.
    It’s nice to have new jerseys, and they are beautiful, however you need Real Hockey Players to fill them.
    The Kings will be in Quebec City in October and I had 2 tickets to see them in pre-season against Boston. I got rid of them…

    A VERY DISSATISFIED FAN

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  4. Our vaunted GM has once again screwed the pooch. Having let Roy walk for nothing back in return, we saddle ourselves with a piss poor lummox who should be playing in the AHL if anywhere in professional hockey. It’s now obvious that unlike his predecessor, Blake is filling out our roster by the seat of his pants, without any real plan to move this team forward. That post playoff discussion about trying to build a team that wins it’s last playoff game was a farce as nothing here comes close to making us more competitive vs. the teams that will finish ahead of us in the division, and that’s assuming we are even good enough to make the playoffs this coming year. I want to be optimistic, but for two summers in a row now, his moves have been so clearly unhelpful as to suggest he doesn’t want us to win.
    DL had his board with players researched and slotted in at every position every step of the way. Blake, at best is grasping at straws to just fill positions with no sense of plan or purpose. He has squandered a farm team full of assets, with not a playoff series win to show for it, and now we gotten less competitive rather than more so. It’s time for this clown to find a new circus, because his judgment isn’t even funny, it’s simply dumber than dumb.

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  5. Blake JUST.KEEPS.DOING.NOTHING.TO.GET.THIS.TEAM.TO.THE.STANLEY.

    Oh my God what a lousy GM. Kings Ownership is asleep as they allow this man to mismanage this team into oblivion.

    “Let’s get this team better by signing a bunch more grinders who can barely score!”
    “Then, just for good measure, let’s make sure we give up plenty of draft capital AND make sure we can barely afford to keep our own talent with the Cap Space we have left!”

    WT Frickin’ HELL has this man done to help this team since 2014? He LUCKED INTO BYFIELD. Other than that…….. zip (as in missed OR sent away what capital he has had to work with)

    Terminate.This.Pretender.

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