Without a first-round pick, Mark Yannetti talks approach heading into 2023 NHL Draft

“If anything, it was easier this year than it was last year. We traded our first-round pick [approximately three] months earlier. We don’t stop scouting on the first round, because you just never know what could happen. I mean, is it likely we’ll have a first round pick this year? No, it’s extraordinarily unlikely, but you want to be prepared, it doesn’t make sense to not be prepared, while at the same time you have to allocate your resources.”

Now in his 17th season with the Kings, Mark Yannetti has headed the organization’s draft boards and has been by the side of Rob Blake and Dean Lombardi at every draft since. As we head into the 2023 edition of the draft, it will be the second consecutive year the Kings do not have a first-round pick, as Yannetti noted above.

Having traded away the 20th overall pick in last year’s draft as half of the package for Kevin Fiala a week before the 2022 NHL Draft, Yannetti explained the differences and advantages that he and his team had when it comes to scouting for the 2023 draft with a three-plus month heads up of not having that first-round draft pick. Once again, the Kings moved their selection on Day 1 in exchange for immediate NHL help, as a part of the package that netted the newly re-signed Vladislav Gavrikov, in addition to goaltender Joonas Korpisalo, at the deadline.

The Kings could still acquire a first-round pick by a variety of means, but they also have to be realistic when allocating their draft resources for potential players. As of right now, their first selection comes late in the second round and they’re preparing as such.

“There’s a finite amount of time we can scout and there’s a finite amount of resources we can look at,” Yannetti explained. “In the meetings with Nelson [Emerson] and Rob [Blake], I knew this was not only a probability, but a likely scenario that we weren’t going to have a first-round pick. [At that point] we had started to transition towards focusing more on the second-round pick, third-round pick, and focusing less on the first-round pick. Then, once the trade did happen, we really transitioned away. If you take the 100% of the time that was going to be spent on the first round, we probably cut it down to 25%.”

When finalizing a list of players, the Kings group their list of players they’re interested in drafting into segmented tiers. It’s not a novel concept, but it’s a concept that helps to find value around certain picks, especially later in drafts, hoping to be on the forefront of runs on players as opposed to the backside.

Those tiers apply to how the Kings will evaluate each pick in different rounds. While we cannot speak on where Yannetti, Blake and the scouting department ranked players such as Francesco Pinelli, Martin Chromiak and Arthur Kaliyev, all three players were higher on the Kings board than where they were selected (Pinelli and Kaliyev were both projected first rounders on external lists and the Kings got both in the second round, while Chromiak was projected much higher than where he was drafted in fifth round).

While many teams often feel they have drafted a player they’ve ranked higher than where the player was actually taken, Yannetti isn’t holding his breathe that a first-round talent is going to drop to the Kings at pick nummber 54, where the Kings are scheduled to first select. Does he expect someone to fall, somewhere, based on where the Kings have their players allowed though? Certainly.

“In my 15 years of drafting, one or two times for sure [a first-round talent has fallen to us that low],” Yannetti said of where the Kings are picking now. “Off the top of my head, someone in our top 21 has been there I want to say three times, but I’d have to verify because he could have been in that 20 to 25 sweet spot. So let’s say three times in the 15 years, someone has been there, but again we’re picking 54. Some of those picks in the 15 years were in the 50 ballpark, but they weren’t [always] 50, sometimes they were before. I think it’s more likely that a player would fall to let’s say 30 to 36, but someone from high on our list should fall……more often than not, I expect someone to fall and expect someone higher on our list to be available to us lower and I expect that multiple times.”

A bit vague, certainly, but you get the gist. He’s not going to just rattle off his rankings. Somewhere along the line, the Kings will have the opportunity to select a player who is higher on their internal draft rankings than the slot they are picking. Most teams will have that at some point, as teams rate and rank players differently.

As we enter the 2023 NHL Draft and offseason, one position for the Kings is glaringly sparse in terms of organizational depth – goalie. The Kings currently have just two goalies under contract. Phoenix Copley signed a one-year, $1.5M extension through 2024 and the newly acquired Erik Portillo has one year remaining on his entry-level contract. With a lot of unknown in that department, what do the Kings do surrounding goaltending in the upcoming draft? One thing Yannetti has learned in his years of scouting and drafting is that you don’t draft for present day holes, especially in the goalie position.

“When you get the percentage rate of goaltenders hitting versus missing, compared to positional players, especially in the top four rounds, your opportunity cost of taking a goalie has you leaving a lot on the table. You have to balance all of those things with drafting a goalie early and then you factor in that we don’t have a first round pick, so if you take a goalie with our second round pick, you’re putting a lower percentage into a pick and now it’s first and second [without a skater]. Now you’re banking on a third-round pick, or vice versa, but if we thought there was a goalie who stood out, we would certainly consider him with a second or third-round pick in this year’s draft. I won’t say if we do think there are.”

Yannetti recalled back to drafts executed under Dean Lombardi that carried a mantra of not selecting goaltenders. The organization did have the luxury of having Jonathan Quick in net, which mitigated the need for goaltenders at the NHL level, but the Kings also found a lot of success with acquiring goaltenders by other means.

Should the Kings look at the goaltending position, the process is a bit different than it is with skaters, because of the unique nature of scouting at that position. The goaltending department with the Kings is also a bit different than it’s been in past seasons, with Bill Ranford now serving in a new role as the Director of Goaltending. Yannetti looks to utilize Ranford quite a bit and seeks input from he and the other goaltending specialists within the organization.

“Everything gets reported to me, but there’s overlap……goalie coaches watch the game differently than a scout does, they might see things a scout might miss, they may see things a scout sees and see it differently or prioritize it differently or break it down deeper,” Yannetti added. “The goalie coaches, the goalie scouts, Billy in particular has had impact on our list going back a long time. None of the goalies get on our final draft list without discussing it with the goalie guys.”

Will the Kings take a goalie? Will a first-round talent fall to the Kings at 54? Will they make a draft-day trade that either sees them move back into the first round or around in the second? We’ll find out in one weeks time, as the NHL Draft kicks off seven days from today in Nashville.