After beginning the weekend with nine selections — already two more than the seven rounds — Mark Yannetti and the LA Kings walked away from this year’s NHL Draft having made a staggering 11 selections. It was the most the team has made in one Draft throughout Yannetti’s entire tenure with the organization.
Building on their addition of Elton Hermansson with pick No. 19 on Friday, LA’s day two haul of future hopefuls included:
– Liam Lefebvre, forward (RD2, 46th overall)
– Adam Goljer, defense (RD2, 49th overall)
– Blake Zielinski, forward (RD3, 80th overall)
– Yegor Rybkin, goalie (RD3, 89th overall)
– Thomas Vandenberg, forward (RD4, 103rd overall)
– Vertti Svensk, defense (RD5, 145th overall)
– Giorgos Pantelas, defense (RD5, 153rd overall)
– Alex Kostov, forward (RD6, 177th overall)
– Tobias Krestan, forward (RD7, 209th overall)
– Lucas Ambrosio, defense (RD7, 223rd overall)
Following the bicoastal fun, emanating from both Buffalo’s Key Arena and Toyota Sports Performance Center in El Segundo, Yannetti met with the media and shared a full slate of opinions on several topics…
[ed. note: selected commentary has been slightly edited and/or paraphrased for reading purposes.]
Yannetti on the reasoning behind trading back into round seven late to grab an 11th player for the prospect pool:
He had popped up on a bunch of guys’ lists. Brian Denny particularly felt kind of passionate about him. We saw that he was still available. You can ‘Ponzi’ a seventh-round pick when you need to. If we need a seventh-round pick, we’ll just do the same thing next year. The cost to get a seventh-round pick is a seventh-round pick.
It just seemed like an easy, smart thing to do. He’s a gigantic kid. He played for the U-18 team for Canada over in Bratislava. He’s been a Hockey Canada guy for a while. I like his character as well. And for a big guy, he did manage to at least be able to move the puck in a capable way. And there’s some intangibles there as well.
With Brian, and then Chris Byrne as a secondary, really wanting to take him — I said, there’s — you can talk about numbers and analytics and projections and prognostications, which I do love. But sometimes you have to go with — an emotional reaction to someone is equally important. And there was an emotional reaction with that kid, so we grabbed him.
On selecting two players committed to Providence, after having multiple players at Denver and St. Cloud in the past, and if this is a consideration at all, or is it just one of those happy coincidences:
[David] Carle did not pay his dues for this month, so we’re not sending any more guys to Denver. [Nate] Lehman has been up to date on his payments, so we’re very happy with that. We’re steering our guys there.
No, it’s really funny. It’s like a serendipitous thing. We ended up with two guys in London. We ended up with three guys in Denver. Way back when, we ended up with three or four guys in St. Cloud. There is no method to it or plan to it. It really just happens.
Now that being said, it really doesn’t just happen — because successful programs run by successful people attract successful players. While we don’t actively look to take a kid who’s going to Denver or who is playing in London or is going to Providence, we certainly like when players are going to teams like that.
You have coaches like Carle, people like the Hunters, you have Lehman. Those guys are proven winners and proven developers. And the programs and those situations can’t be ignored. While we don’t look for it, we certainly like that. And it’s not surprising to me that those are the type of schools that have a lot of guys picked from.
On selecting five players from overseas and if any of them are expected to be taken in the CHL Import Draft later this week, which may help get them to North America sooner:
That’s a separate thing. It’s harder to talk about that until it happens. But yeah, I would not be surprised if one or two of the guys, or someone from that group, does end up in North America. But it’s certainly not a plan.
Like, if you’re insinuating maybe a Hermanson or something like that — no, he’s going back to MoDo, which is a perfect place, playing big minutes against men in the second division there. There’s a history of guys going back to the Allsvenskan and being pretty good — Ekman-Larsson just springs to mind.
The development situations in Europe are all really good. Goljer— he’s already played over 20 minutes in some games last year in the men’s league. It’s not one of those situations like with Cihar where the minutes were low and you want to get them over here. But I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the guys comes over and plays in the CHL.
On Hermansson and what went into the decision to land him in the first round, and how confident was he that they could trade back and still land him:
I was relatively confident even before the Draft that we’d be able to move back. That really — I think I said it — it really wasn’t my plan to move back as much. I thought we would make the 17th pick.
At some point — when I say “we,” at some point I can talk about all this move-back stuff and these projections we do and stuff. But at some point, you have to pick the guy.
We were planning on picking one of three guys at 17. We thought for sure one guy would be there at 17. We thought in that group of three, the second guy had a 50-50 — so you’re looking at a coin-flip chance. And then we thought there was one guy who was a dream scenario.
My thoughts going to the Draft — the dream scenario is obviously not going to be there. You lose a coin flip half the time. My thought was that at 14 or 15, we’re going to have one guy left, and you pick that guy. You do all this work, all this scouting and evaluating through the season, to determine who’s the guy.
I would not have left it to chance. When we moved back, we still had two of the guys there. And based on moving back to 19 — you get a dodge, you get 17 and 18 — you’re getting your guy. So that opportunity presented itself. It was unique. They took every bit of risk out of it.
And when there’s zero risk that you’re going to get your guy, it doesn’t make sense not to move. Now, there were other scenarios — we had chances to move back with four separate teams, including one that would have taken us out of the first round with some high second-round picks involved. And every one of those now brought risk. Once you do that, you’re gambling. If you have one guy in your tier and you move back two spots, three spots, five spots — you can’t sit here and say you’re running a projection-based thing. It’s gambling.
So 19 — no gamble. If you move back to 24, there’s quite a good chance that Hermanson wouldn’t be there.
And [Christian] Ruuttu — our whole staff, but in terms of Europeans — there were two guys that Ruuttu wanted, and Hermanson was one of them. And the other guy was long gone. We made a determination we were going to pick our guy. And it was just luck that you can go into a situation and not have risk.
On Lefebvre, who was in the Draft for his second year; what made him such an exciting pick in the second round:
The success rate on overage picks in the Draft is quite good. So there’s always that. But he’s a unique case in terms of an overage. You always want that extra data. I’ve always said that.
But one of the really unique and cool things about Lefebvre is he played at Trinity-Pawling High School in the New England prep schools. And compared to other levels, it’s a lower level of hockey. It’s not a level that you — I mean, the other kid, Bleyl, did it this year too. It’s just not something — now with the colleges, with CHL guys being able to play college, you’re going to see it a little more. But you’re going from a lower level of hockey to a higher level of hockey, and he actually played better in the Quebec League than he even did at Trinity-Pawling.
Now, he was also hurt for a better part of the year — his original draft year. He played through an injury for almost more than half of the season. Never showed it. It certainly affected his game.
And all of a sudden, you’re watching him in the Quebec League and you’re like, this is just a different guy. This is just a different player. And then you start doing some due diligence and you find out, okay, he was hurt for half the year. He played through it. And then you talk to some coaches and you talk to some people, and they’re like, oh, he’s the most dedicated kid I’ve ever had. The word “special” in terms of intangibles came up a lot.
Now you have this background information, and then it starts to say, well, no wonder he’s excelling or defying expectations. So it was really cool to see that kind of progression. And then he made a progression from the beginning of the season this year to the end. If you watch this kid play in the playoffs — he was a big-game player. He scored big goals in big moments in the Quebec League finals and playoffs. And he scored in the Memorial Cup. He had a nice fight in the Memorial Cup.
This is a kid that — the bigger the game, the higher level performance he has. There were so many little things that went into it. He had 32 goals. He’s a rock-solid two-way player. He can play center, he can play wing. He’s got goal-scoring touch. He’s 6-3.
Then there’s the fact that he has good sense. Sense would be a secondary element of his game. But you start going back and watching some of last year’s film and seeing where we might have missed things, and you’re like, oh, the hockey sense was there in this situation, and now it’s magnified in the Quebec League.
All of those things go into him at that pick. And he would have been a targeted pick. We were hoping to get him with 46 or 49. We didn’t think we’d have to move up. And obviously we wouldn’t have skipped over better players. But there were three or four guys in our room that were crossing their fingers that he was there at 46 and no one was ahead of him.
On the selling point with Zielinski at pick No. 80; some scouts say he’s a guy who really has a willingness to go to the dirty areas and has a high compete level:
Absolutely. That’s the biggest thing about him. Some of those intangibles, on ice and off ice. He’s a high, high character kid. He’s a worker. He’s a worker on the ice, and he’s a worker in terms of taking charge of his own development, trying to become the best at what he can be.
Those two things kind of bleed over — off the ice and on the ice. Also, he’s over a point-a-game player in the USHL. That certainly isn’t a bad thing.
He’s one of those guys that has that work ethic and the intangibles you sometimes find with a lower-lineup-level player — a guy playing lower in the lineup — and he’s also running numbers, playing on the first line in the USHL. So that combination of work and intangibles to go along with skill — and sense as a secondary — certainly separated him and made him valuable to us.
On Rybkin at pick 89 and the fact LA already has a deep goaltending pipeline right now:
He’s 6-foot-6. You don’t have a whole lot of polished 6-ft-6 athletes [in net]. His injury last year was a freak injury. It happened in a mall. It’s not like his hips or his shoulders were problematic. He got hurt in a kind of freak accident. That was something that didn’t really concern us.
His ceiling is crazy high. He’s big. We managed to get to see him and talk to him and get down deep at Milstein’s camp at the end of June — the Russian camp. We had five days with him. And we had both Steve and Bill Ranford there, as well as a couple of other scouts — Chris Byrne and Ron Payette. We had eyes on him throughout the year, and then we had that kind of intimate viewing.
We got to see him practice. We got to see him do the goalie practice. We got to see him do a regular practice. We got to see him up close on ice in the scrimmages. We got to see him in the gym. We talked to him — two separate interviews with him.
And that was the case for the other guys too. Borichev was one of them. Ivchenko, Ivanov was one of them. We were fortunate to have multiple eyes on guys like that.
And our goalie guys thought that this was someone who they really wanted to work with. As you said, he’s raw. They love the fact that when you have a big guy, especially at a young age, there’s a lot of holes in terms of presentation. And when this kid moved or when he did things, there weren’t as many holes.
Now he’s going to have to clean up his skating, which is no surprise for a 6-6 guy. He’s going to have to clean up some of his movement things, which is normal. But in ranking the guys at that camp and looking at them, there were a few guys at the camp that they really wanted to work with. Ribkin was one of them.
The fact that he speaks excellent English certainly won’t hurt him from a development standpoint.
And the goaltending pipeline allows us to — I don’t want to say take a swing, because I don’t think we would take a swing. There has to be a realistic expectation of success, not just cross your fingers and say a prayer. There are a lot of foundational elements they liked.
We were going to pick him — we could have picked him at 86. That would have been the pick. We were fortunate enough to get an offer and move back and pick up one more spot and still get him. And some of the risk of that is taken out as well because our goalie prospect pool is so deep. If some unforeseen thing happened, it would not have been the end of the world. It wouldn’t have been what we wanted, but it wouldn’t have been the end of the world.
And the other thing too — we’ve in the past skipped over goalies, partially due to having Jones, Quick, and Bernier, and partially because some guys told us they wouldn’t come — they would just stay over in Europe or they wouldn’t sign. Frederik Andersen told us that.
So you get lulled into this false sense of security that your goaltending pipeline is so deep that you stop drafting goalies, and then you get a situation like we had a few years ago. I do like the idea of drafting a goalie every year or every other year. I think that’s a smart strategy. Even though our prospect pool was deep, I think it made sense to continue building from strength.
On the two picks that were kind of grouped together — Svensk and Pantelas — do they speak to the two different directions that LA is looking to shore up on the blueline:
Well, it certainly doesn’t hurt to get one of each kind of defenseman in a Draft. And as you said, right next to each other, because obviously then they’re similar levels. It’s not like you’re getting a physical bigger guy who’s a lower level and then a skating guy who’s a higher level, or vice versa.
It worked out that way. We didn’t deviate. If I’m making the decision, I wouldn’t deviate from the best player on our list except in the rarest of circumstances.
It just happened that Svensk is that slick, elite-skating, puck-moving defenseman, and [Pantelas] is that bigger, more physical, stay-at-home type. It just happened that way.
But it’s nice to have that kind of versatility — picks where you fill two completely opposite boxes with guys in a very close pick range. And while they’re not similar as players, they’re close in levels of what each one does in that element, in that role.
On the mix among this year’s 11 picks — one goalie, four defensemen, and six forwards; is there anything the group wasn’t able to do at the Draft this year that they wanted to:
There were a lot of opportunities. It was a really cool Draft in terms of that. I’ve lamented the fact in the past that it’s been hard to move at certain times.
A lot of people — it’s funny — there’s patterns emerging in the last three or four years. We thought Billy [Armstrong] from Utah would be a guy who might want to move up. He’s aggressive. And two people had called us saying, “We know you like to move back.”
People are kind of getting a feel — there’s Carolina, Montreal, us, a couple other teams that seem to be in the vein of moving back. And now there seem to be three or four teams that are in the vein of moving up. You saw a lot of picks traded that way. It’s pretty cool that that is now starting to become something.
We could have moved back four more times or three more times in the first. We actually had a bunch of offers for 17. Seventeen seemed to be a pick that people wanted. We had a couple of offers for 17. Even when we moved back to 19, we had an offer. And then obviously at 86, we had an offer.
We did have an offer at 46 — we didn’t want to move.
And then we did try to move up in the fourth. There was a particular player that one of our scouts was — he was next on the list. And then there was a big — there was a multiple-layer gap the way our list went. There was one player left, and then two or three layers completely wiped out. He was a player that the scout really wanted. He was very high on the list compared to the next guy.
We actually offered more than the team traded for. And before you’re like, “Well, that doesn’t make sense” — we offered two picks to move up in the fourth. And the other team offered two. Our fourth was higher and our other pick that we offered was higher.
And the really cool thing about it — and the reason I’m not mad — the team we offered to trade with had already made a handshake deal to trade with another team. And I don’t think you can get mad at someone for being honorable and keeping their word.
Because a couple drafts ago, we had had that exact same thing where we had made a deal with a team to move up. And just as we’re putting it into the NHL system, they called us and said, “Oh, we got a better offer, we’re out.” And then they don’t even explain — they’re kind of cowards and hang up the phone and don’t ever talk about it again.
So it was frustrating in the fact that our guy went before we could get him. We couldn’t get him. But it was also kind of cool that someone had the integrity to not bait and switch when they could have had a better offer.
It’s hard to be mad or frustrated. It’s just too bad, because that deal would have gotten us the guy we wanted. And by the time we did pick, he wasn’t there.
For more with Yannetti, be sure to see his recent KOTP appearance linked below.
MORE LA KINGS NEWS:
Kings Of The Podcast, Ep. 268 with Mark Yannetti, NHL Draft Preview
Predictions: LA Kings Selections at the 2026 NHL Entry Draft
LA Kings Select Elton Hermansson at No. 19 – What You Need to Know
Note to webmasters/reporters: When recapping news or interviews from this site please remember to include a link to www.MayorsManor.com