A question was asked about the Visnovsky trade, and why the Kings dealt Visnovsky so quickly after seemingly designating him as a “franchise player” going forward. For the first part of his answer, Lombardi went to his age-distribution chart and talked the fans through his opinion of why the trade made sense, from a standpoint of making the defense younger. He also spoke about the financial side of the deal and Hextall talked about why he felt the trade made sense from an on-ice standpoint…

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LOMBARDI: This is certainly not an indictment of the player. He’s one of my favorite players, but it’s just one of those things you have to do. The other thing that was showing up, and this goes back to what we were talking about with offer sheets… This market continues to take off for the young players and it’s getting harder and harder to lock them up. This is what Solly was talking about, even in Stoll’s case. That contract, since the day we traded for him, has taken right up until this week.

Holding that number for Lubo in years two and three was getting a little dicey, if we were going to have that space and everything to keep Johnson and Doughty and all these kids, going forward. Those are the two things you look at, but it’s certainly not an indictment. We turned it into two assets that can grow with this group, and now we have to try to replace him from within, which isn’t going to be easy. Like I said, he’s a special guy.

HEXTALL: The other thing, and there are a lot of things that go into that decision, but one was that when we looked at our defense moving forward… We got asked the question before about our size on the back end. The obvious thing is, Lubo wasn’t a big guy. I was one of LUbo’s biggest fans, and it hurt me to be honest, when we traded him, but again we’ve got Jack and Doughty, and we were able to bring Greene in and we’ve also got Hickey coming. When we looked at the whole mix moving forward, Lubo had a long-term deal and he had a no-trade clause starting July 1, so if we were going to move him we pretty much had to move him then. There’s a lot of different factors that come into the equation, but those are a couple of them.