Rick Nash to the Kings: Why it could and should happen – Lisa Dillman – latimes.com
Rick Nash to the Kings? Nearly everyone in the hockey world believes it will happen. And why wouldn’t they?
I’m just impressed that Lisa Dillman has access to all those people.
[…] Indeed, talks have occurred this week between the Kings and Blue Jackets regarding what it will take to acquire the dynamic right wing.
One thing I don’t like about the way journalists repackage the work of other journalists or (gasp) bloggers is that it’s almost impossible to tell for sure when a reporter is actually reporting something. I can’t tell whether “talks have occurred this week” is something this reporter learned first hand, or from a source, or whether it’s just something she read somewhere. This isn’t a knock on the reporter. In “the old days” you just took it for granted that when a reporter reported a factual statement like “talks have occurred this week” that the reporter has reliable first-hand evidence of it. Now, though, I just assume the opposite.
Although deals this complex don’t happen in the space of a few hours, or keystrokes, the Kings possess the assets to make it come to fruition: a promising goalie, a wealth of defensemen, and youth. It adds up to an intriguing mix that GM Scott Howson can sell to his disgruntled fan base in Columbus.
I don’t see how he’s going to sell “I just traded the franchise for a handful of magic beans” to the disgruntled fan base. Not to mention the fact that the Kings can’t just take on $8MM in cap hit without sending several million dollars to Columbus.
And speaking of disgruntled…. The seemingly endless goodwill and patience of Kings’ fans vaporized with the arrival of their mail the other day, which brought the announcement of a significant season-seat price increase. Their frustration and anger was nicely summarized by Times colleague Helene Elliott.
I thought it was funny that the season ticket holders were upset that their prices were going up at a time when the on-ice product is lacking (my paraphrase), as if the team weren’t in 7th place, a few points out of 4th (yes, and 12th), and on course for one of its top point totals in franchise history. Yeah, I know, “30th in the league in scoring”, but you would think they were hiking the prices while competing for 1st pick overall.
Which comes back to Nash. Very rarely do hockey trades work on an organizational (hockey department) level and marketing level. This accomplishes both and would quell the outrage about the price increase. Nash to Los Angeles is the marquee move that Kings’ president and GM Dean Lombardi tried to pull off, first with Ilya Kovalchuk and, more recently, last summer with Brad Richards, who ended up with the New York Rangers. Did we mention Lombardi’s boss, AEG’s Tim Leiweke, likes headline-making moves? OK, check that. Loves them. Keeping David Beckham in L.A. and bringing a bona fide star to the Kings, all in all, would not be a bad couple of months of work for Leiweke.
I thought that’s what the Mike Richards trade was.