With all the Vancouver reporters in town yesterday, of course Marc Crawford, their former coach, was a popular man. He faced some questions about the present and future of the Kings, particularly in regards to the trades the Kings have made to become younger. I thought he gave one interesting answer, in particular.

“Trading away guys like Conroy, Avery and Norstrom, that was to signify that we’re changing,” Crawford said. “We knows if we’re right or wrong. Only time will tell, but we thought it was right to just tear things down and build in the right way.”

When Dean Lombardi got hired, he had a couple different plans for the direction of the team. Privately, I’m told that Lombardi wanted to go with the burn-and-rebuild strategy immediately, but some in the organization were nervous because it would all but assure a rough season, and the Kings didn’t know how fans would respond to that. Well, as it turns out, the season was rough anyway, and now Lombardi is free to do what he wanted to do from the start, which is build around his young players and acquire a small army of draft picks. The same strategy worked well for him in San Jose, so we’ll see if he can pull it off again with the Kings.