Can Penguins take any lessons from Kings’ rebuild?

The Pittsburgh Penguins host the Los Angeles Kings on Tuesday night and there might be some lessons to take on how quickly the Kings returned to competitiveness.

The Pittsburgh Penguins are hosting the Los Angeles Kings on Tuesday night, and it is going to be one of their toughest games of the first half of the season. The Kings are not only coming into the game having won seven of their past eight games, they are one of the league’s best teams for the season and featuring one of the most suffocating and smothering defenses in the NHL. Getting even a point out of this game will be a success for the Penguins.

The Kings are also fascinating to me because of how quickly they were able to cycle through a rebuild and return to relevance as a legitimate contender in the Western Conference.

Is there anything the Penguins can take from how the Kings were able to pull it off?

In the early part of the 2010s the Kings were one of the best teams in hockey, rivaling the Chicago Blackhawks for league dominance. They won Stanley Cups in 2012 and 2014 and had a Western Conference Finals appearance sandwiched in between those two championship bookends.

Over the next couple of years they started to take a step backwards, and by 2017-18 it was clearly time for them to start rebuilding and re-tooling the roster.

So they did.

But it was not a traditional rebuild in the way so many other teams have tried to do it in the NHL. They traded veterans, but they were selective about who they traded, and when they traded them. While they did have two years where they bottomed out in the standings, it happened more organically and was not the result of a full-scale tanking effort. They just .... were not good.

The thing I keep coming back to is not who they DID trade, but who they did NOT trade.

Specifically: Anze Kopitar, Drew Doughty, Dustin Brown and Jonathan Quick (yes they eventually did trade Quick, but it was after they had become a playoff team again).

It would have been really, really easy for general manager Rob Blake to try and sell off Kopitar, Doughty or even Brown in an effort bring back a big haul in return. I know some of those players (Doughty) had big contracts, but I also feel like they are the type of players that other GMs would have crawled over broken glass to try and acquire if they could.

I think there is a lot to be said for keeping players like that, even through some down years. The problem with going with a full-scale, scorched-earth rebuild is that it not only takes way longer than anybody ever hopes or anticipates, but it also tends to create a culture of losing. Then the losing becomes acceptable.

“Well, we aren’t supposed to win anyway right now, so just get the better draft pick.”

Players do not take that approach. Coaches do not take that approach. But the organization might. Fans definitely do. And that can create a losing culture that can be difficult to escape.

Watching teams like Buffalo, Ottawa, and Detroit, and to a more recent extent Montreal, San Jose and Chicago (the latter three are in earlier stages of their rebuilds) go on to nearly decades-long playoff droughts (and in the case of Buffalo, almost a decade-and-a-half) has made me rethink whether or not a full-scale rebuild is the right approach if you can avoid it.

The mid-2000s Penguins and Washington Capitals were enormously lucky to be bad at the right time when a handful of general megastars were entering the NHL.

Edmonton’s three straight No. 1 overall picks didn’t mean a damn thing until they landed the fourth one who just happened to be “the guy.”

You need a lot of luck and a lot of timing to pull out of that cycle. You are not guaranteed to get that luck.

By keeping the true core players like Kopitar, Doughty, Brown and Quick it helped the organization maintain a level of credibility and still kept that mindset of competing. Instead of dealing them, they dealt the second-level and fringe players like Jake Muzzin, Tyler Toffoli, Tanner Pearson and Kyle Clifford.

Not all of the returns worked out, but getting Sean Durzi, Carl Grundstrom and a first-round pick for Muzzin turned out to be a shrewd piece of business. Even then, it was not so much about the individual return for Muzzin. It was about getting the return for Muzzin and still having one of your core defenseman in Doughty alongside of it and your franchise center (Kopitar).

The other thing the Kings did was have a sense of urgency and a desire to get better as quickly as possible. They did not wait for every single prospect to pan out and become good before they started adding to the roster with established players.

There was no “the time is not right mentality.”

In the summer of 2021 the Kings were coming off their third-straight non-playoff season and still seemingly in the middle of a rebuild. They were 25th in the league standings. Instead of leaning into that and waiting for young players to develop, they became proactive and signed Phillip Danault in free agency and traded some of the draft picks they had acquired in previous trades to get Viktor Arvidsson from the Nashville Predators. At the time, those moves received some criticism because it was seen as “too soon,” and that the Kings were not at a stage where they needed to be adding established veterans.

But Danault and Arvidsson ended up being two of their top-four scorers and helped form an outstanding second-line over the next couple of years that played a huge role in turning the Kings back into a playoff team.

The next year they made an even bigger trade to get Kevin Fiala, a legitimate first-line scorer, from the Minnesota Wild.

I know the Kings have not won a playoff series in their three years back in the playoffs (do they have a roster problem or an Edmonton Oilers problem?), but I do think there is a lot to be said for how quickly they went from Champion, to rebuilding, to playoff team again. And I do think there are some lessons to take from it. Specifically — you have to keep somebody and you have to actually make an effort to get better instead of just waiting around.

The Kings still had to develop players internally through their farm system (and while they have not hit a superstar, they have still brought along some good, productive players) and their core group of players (specifically Kopitar and Doughty) are a few years younger than the Penguins’ core group of Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang. That does make a difference, and the Penguins still have to prove they can develop guys like Owen Pickering, Rutger McGroarty, Tristan Broz, Harrison Brunicke, Tanner Howe and Sergei Musharov.

But even so, keeping core players can still maintain a desire for competitiveness, keep a winning cultire, create a sense of urgency, and perhaps buy you more time until your prospects develop and you maybe hit some luck in the lottery and the draft.

Watching the way the Kings got back to the playoffs, and the way the Capitals built themselves into a contender again this season is interesting to watch in contrast to the continued buffoonery of teams like the Sabres, Red Wings and Senators who can not get out of their own way or break their cycle.