The Throne Room

High Stakes Gambling…

When the clock struck noon Pacific time today, it appeared as though the Kings had done about what most of us expected…very little. Sean O’Donnell (1 year, $1.25M) and Erik Ersberg (2 years, $1.5M) got well deserved contract extensions. It looked as if the trade deadline would come and go with little fanfare. Then, at about 40 minutes past noon, BOOM. The NHL finished the paperwork on a 3 way deal that was Patrick O’Sullivan and a 2nd round pick go from the Kings to Carolina and finally Edmonton, Erik Cole return to Carolina and Justin Williams to LA. My initial reaction, as was the reaction of most Kings’ fans was an astounding “WHAT!”.

It does seem like Dean Lombardi grossly overpaid for a 27 year old player who hasn’t been healthy most of the last 3 seasons. As the story goes, the Kings spent lots of time looking over Williams’ medical records, making sure that he would make full recovery from his laundry list of injuries sustained over the past 24 months. Williams is on Inured Reserve currently and will likely not play before the season ends, lest the Kings’ make a huge push to get in the playoffs. Patrick O’Sullivan and a 2nd round pick for a guy on IR? For me, this is a gamble of the Cloutier variety, and we all remember how that turned out.

The positives of this are, assuming Williams is able to get healthy and stay healthy, he is one hell of a hockey player. Before the injury bug seemingly infested him he had back to back 30+ goal seasons and was an All-Star in 2007. He is a big winger with lots of grit, who likes to go to the net. The pre 2007-2008 version of Justin Williams is exactly the type of player the Kings need. Check out the highlights of some of the goals he has scored on NHL.com and there’s no doubt the guy can play. The flipside of that is that if he can’t get healthy and remains perpetually on IR, the Kings gave up a very talented player for not much really.

This is not a popular trade, as O’Sullivan was a fan favorite in LA. Sully is immensely talented, and frankly it’s going to suck having to play against him 4 times a year in Edmonton. I had envisioned O’Sullivan as part of the Kings core long term.

The only guy who knows the full story on why this went down is Dean Lombardi. We won’t ever know if Sully wasn’t a standup guy in the locker room, or if his holding out this preseason left wounds that simply didn’t heal. Hard to imagine that there wasn’t some other subplot to giving up that much for a guy like Williams.

Perhaps the most difficult part, as much as this seems extremely risky right now, is that as Kings’ fans collectively, we won’t get to find out if this was a good or bad deal until next season likely. For the remainder of 2008-09 our roster is simply short one very talented #12.

Dean Lombardi is a smart guy. He does his homework. Let’s hope his gamble pays off. If it doesn’t, it will bite this team in the ass.

Kings face Dallas at Staples Center tomorrow evening.

-JS