Lubomir Visnovsky has been traded to Edmonton for Jarret Stoll and Matt Greene. More info to follow…

Back from Minneapolis and, as usual, it feels good to be in L.A. For those who haven’t been there, Minneapolis has a nice downtown area. But I found it interesting to note that in the “State of Hockey,” I saw more people wearing Kevin Garnett Boston Celtics jerseys than anything else. They’re confused people these days, those Minnesotans…

The free-agent signing period begins Tuesday, and it’s such a different feel from last year, when the Kings were presumed to be in the hunt for so many of the “big-name” free agents. It certainly doesn’t appear as though that will be the case this week.

At this point, I would expect the Kings to sign two free-agent defensemen and one free-agent forward, probably a winger. Brad Stuart and Rob Blake remain the most-likely defensemen to be signed. The Kings will have a better shot at getting Stuart than was initially expected and are helped by the fact that Stuart’s agent is Pat Brisson, who is L.A.-based, a close friend of Luc Robitaille and also the agent for Blake and Jack Johnson. It might come down to how much Detroit is bluffing and how much Ken Holland is really willing to spend on Stuart. Stuart made $3.5 million last season and Detroit is claiming it only wants to spend around $3 million per season on Stuart. We’ll see.

As for Blake, he will return as long as he has the desire to play and the Kings feel he’s healthy and ready to go. Shouldn’t be much of a question that he will be back.

As for which forward might sign, that’s a completely open book. Go ahead and speculate away. It’s one of those trickle-down effect things. The top free-agent forwards will sign and then teams will start to take a closer look at the second-tier guys. So we’ll have to see how that shakes out. It’s impossible to predict that market right now.

I expect to get Dean Lombardi on the phone tomorrow to get his thoughts going into free agency, and of course on Tuesday I’ll have continuous updates throughout the day.

Don tracked down defenseman Colten Teubert, one of the Kings’ first-round draft picks, for a great interview. From everything I’ve read and heard from Teubert, it seems like he’s going to be quite a personality and quite a player to watch. Don did a great job of bringing out his personality, so enjoy!
Continue reading “Colten Teubert interview” »

Sorry for the lack of posts, but the days are taken up by workshops here at this sports editors conference in Minneapolis.

So by now, this is fairly old news, but next season’s salary cap will be $56.7 million and the “floor” will be $40.7 million. Except the Kings to be much closer to the floor than the ceiling.

So the salary cap increases by six million. I saw one of the comments asking about whether this was a positive and a negative. I see it as a real negative, and the discussion around the NHL is trending this way. The sense is that it’s creating the type of class warfare that existed before the lockout, although to a lesser extent. The “haves” will be able to spend $56 million and the “have nots” won’t. You might ask, wasn’t the new collective-bargaining agreement supposed to prevent that? Yes, yes it was. It’s a good question for Gary Bettman and some of the owners…

Hello from humid Minneapolis. Here’s the news on the qualifying offers. It’s just a list, no context right now of why the other two guys weren’t offered. This is official as of 2 p.m. today…

The Kings have extended qualifying offers to the following players:

Erik Ersberg
Gabe Gauthier
Peter Harrold
Matt Moulson
Patrick O’Sullivan
Joe Piskula
Brad Richardson

The Kings have not extended qualifying offers to the following players:

Petr Kanko
Dany Roussin

From what I understand, today is the day for qualifying offers to restricted free agents. I’m on my way to a sports editors’ convention in Minneapolis for the rest of the week, but I will do my best to post, later today, the news about qualifying offers…