The Kings Did Their Free Agency Shopping At A Bin Store

The Los Angeles Kings entered free agency with one mission: to build a team better than the Oilers, who've eliminated them in the first round in each of the last four postseasons. Enter new GM Ken Holland, who in his post–Red Wings career has a pathological fetish for signing veterans and depth guys and then expecting too much from them in a cursed chimera of a lineup. Seriously, this guy hasn't met a roster he couldn't make older. He's testing the limits of how much he can pay a third defensive pairing and still find employment. He hasn't changed his opinion of what makes a useful NHL player since the Bush administration. He acts as if the salary cap is just a phase, and the league will toss it out any day now. He recoils from the word "rebuild" like a rabies patient from water.

So it was with both glee and trepidation that the world watched the Kings head into free agency with a whopping $23.5 million in cap space, and mostly bare shelves to spend it on, after nearly all the top available guys found homes before the store opened. True to form, their Day 1 spending spree proved to be extremely funny.

A veteran backup goalie, two veteran third-pairing blueliners who will probably be asked to be a second pairing, a 40-year-old fourth-line winger who the fans have spent more than a decade despising, and a relatively spry 32-year-old fourth-line winger. Oh, and they extended Andrei Kuzmenko for one year.

I am not trying to be mean to any of these players, who are what they are and are capable of making NHL contributions (in Ceci's case, his talents are two: eating minutes and convincing GMs to pay him). I am just observing that there's probably not as much added value in all these guys combined as there is in Vladislav Gavrikov, the defenseman the Kings let walk on an entirely reasonable deal. But this is classic Ken Holland: creating doodoo in the aggregate.

Certainly, the Kings needed More Guys. By the end of their series against the Oilers, they were basically rolling 13 skaters because their depth guys were, like, Mariana Trench–level. And certainly, the Kings had money to spend on a tepid free-agent pool, and they don't get to put that cap space in the bank for later if they don't use it. But once you're giving 4x4.5 to Cody Ceci, do you at no point consider just overpaying Nik Ehlers instead, to get an actually excellent player on your team that needs them? The Kings have some legit top talent but not enough, and a hump they can't seem to get over, and they've chosen to address it by sifting through the league's bargain bin and paying retail anyway. God bless Ken Holland.