Recapping LA Kings Draft Weekend + Mark Yannetti’s Post-Draft Interview

I’ve got to say, I haven’t seen an LA Kings draft class rated as highly as this one in quite some time.

Ultimately, how these players are rated at 18 isn’t what’s important. When we look back 5-7 years from now is when you really get a sense for whether or not a draft class was successful. However, there’s no crystal ball to get a glimpse into the future, so all we have are today’s thoughts.

And today’s thoughts are pretty good. Looking at most external evaluators, the Kings rated pretty highly. Both prospect writers at The Athletic had the Kings among their top-six evaluations. ESPN had the Kings among their six teams in the “A” range while Daily Faceoff had only two teams rated higher. Looking for the impartial evaluations, most seemed to be on-board with what the Kings did this weekend.

The Kings landed a high-skill player in Round 1, adding Elton Hermansson to the prospect pool. Hermansson instantly becomes the highest-upside player up front in the system. His top-end talent is not something the Kings have in other areas and he’s a really exciting player to add into the mix, as one of the best players in the draft with the puck on his stick.

Round 2 was a solid round. I don’t think the upside is what the Kings got in Hermansson but in selecting Liam Lefebvre and Adam Goljer, the Kings got a pair of prospects with a good balance between floor and ceiling. Most reports see both players with strong chances of becoming NHL players, though maybe not top line or pairing guys. Lefebvre does a lot of things well and has a highly-rated shot through the middle of the ice. Goljer has a wide array of evaluations, but all seem to boil down to a well-rounded, two-way defenseman who can contribute all over the ice.

I posted this on social media but I haven’t had so many people mention to me how much love there is internally for Lefebvre in a long time. He’s the kind of guy that several scouts banged the table for, so to speak. The player who was a must have on the list, with Pick 46 essentially tailor-made for the selection. If the Kings had traded up in Round 2 – and there were opportunities to do so – it would have been Lefebvre at 49 without a doubt. He’s a player the Kings would’ve been extremely disappointed to leave the draft without.

Heard this now from 4-5 different people that Liam Lefebvre was such a unanimously loved player by several Kings scouts. As much as I can recall with a second-round pick in some time.

with 2 second rounders, feels like there was almost no way he didn't wind up in Los Angeles. https://t.co/iYdrDUZE1C

— Zach Dooley (@DooleyLAK) June 28, 2026

What I liked about the remainder of the Kings draft is that they blended quality with quantity. The Kings made 11 draft picks this weekend, the most they’ve made in a long time. The Kings have made double-digit picks three times in the modern era of the draft with seven rounds. In each of those three drafts, they selected at least three players who I would consider to be NHL regulars in one form or another, with 12 in total across those three drafts. Not always in Los Angeles, but NHL regulars. If you get 3-4 players from a draft class who you’d consider to be regulars, you’ve done a good job.

The Kings had a high volume with 10 picks on Day 2. You’ll miss more on the percentage but the odds of hitting more is simply in the numbers. Would you rather hit 2 of 6 or 3 of 10? The approach the Kings seemed to take in rounds three and four was centered around a pair of all-around forwards in Blake Zielinski and Thomas Vandenberg as well as goaltender Yegor Rybkin. Zielinski and Vandenberg are players who rate fairly well in most areas, even if they lack a defining trait. There are multiple ways players like that can reach the NHL though likely several years down the road as mid-round picks. Both are headed to Providence College, both have some runway between now and then, but both were highly regarded. Rybkin is a huge goaltender – literally, he is six-foot seven – and the goaltending department at the Kings seems quite excited to add him into the pool. The Kings have three goalies in the system who are all 2005 or 2006 birth years. Adding Rybkin who is a late 2007 adds a younger option and spreads him out from Carter George, Hampton Slukynsky and Petteri Rimpinen.

Rounds 5 – 7, you saw an approach to taking players with high-end traits or perhaps overall packages of traits that you can see becoming NHL players if everything comes together. Take fifth-round selection Vertti Svensk. Elite skater who has holes elsewhere in his game. He’s 18 and he excels from the blueline in a particular area. If he can round out other areas, the elite trait will continue to shine through and set him apart. For a sixth-round pick like Alex Kostov, he’s an overaged pick who didn’t put it together in the CHL until this past season. But he did in his age-19 season, producing at over a point-per-game pace with a 6-4 frame. Putting it together in the OHL and the NHL are very different things. But there’s something to project there. Lots of different profiles in the later rounds but seemed to be a steady theme. There are tons of guys in there where you can see a path, even knowing that the hit rate later in draft is in the single digits even for the best of drafting teams.

For Mark Yannetti’s takeaways from Draft Weekend, see the full interview here below. Yannetti, the Kings’ Director of Amateur Scouting, oversees these weekends and often offers a lot of detail in his availabilities.

On the decision to trade down in Round 1 and the certainty in still having Elton Hermansson available at Pick 19
I was relatively confident, even before the draft, that we’d be able to move back. It really wasn’t my plan to move back – we did it twice in the draft – but I thought we would make the 17th pick. I can talk about all this move back and these projections we do and stuff but at some point you’ve got to pick the guy, so 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 [chance] so you’re looking at a coin-flip chance and then we thought there was one guy who’s a dream scenario.. My thoughts going to the draft, the dream scenario is obviously not going to be there and you lose a coin flip half of the time, so my thought was that 14 or 15, we’re going to have one guy left and you pick that guy. You do all this work, you do all this scouting and evaluating through the season to determine who iss the guy, so 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’ve got to dodge, 17 and 18 and you know you get your guy. That opportunity presented itself. It was unique. It took every bit of risk out of it. When there’s zero risk that you’re going to get your guy, it doesn’t make sense not to move.

On drafting overaged players, beginning with Liam Lefevbre
The success rate on overage picks in the draft is quite good, so there’s always that, but [Liam Lefevbre] is 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 Lefevbre is he played at Trinity-Pawling High School and the New England Prep Schools and compared to other levels, it’s a lower level of hockey. 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 in 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. Then you start doing some due diligence and you find, okay, he was hurt for half the year, he played hurt and then you talk to some coaches, you talk to some people, and it’s, 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 it starts to say, well, no wonder he’s excelling or he’s defying expectations. It was really cool to see that kind of a progression and then he made a progression from the beginning of the season this year to the end. I mean, if you watched this kid play in the playoffs, you know he was a big-game player, he scored big goals and 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. So, 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, you know. As I said, 32 goals, he’s got goal scoring touch, he’s 6-3 and then there’s the fact that he’s got 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 people or where we might have missed things, and you’re like, oh, the hockey sense was there in the situation and now it’s magnified in the Quebec League. All of those things go into him at that pick and that 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, but obviously we wouldn’t have skipped over him.

On selecting defensemen with varying skillsets later in the draft
It certainly doesn’t hurt to get one of each kind of defenseman in a draft and right next to each other, because then they’re similar levels. It’s not like you’re getting a physical, bigger guy who is a lower level and then a skating guy who is a higher level or vice-versa. It worked out that way, we didn’t deviate. If I am making the decision, I wouldn’t deviate from the best player on our list, except in the rarest of circumstances. It actually happened that way, that Svensk is that slick, elite skater and puck-moving defenseman and the Pantellas is that more physical, stay at home type. It just happened that way, but it’s nice to get that kind of versatility of picks where you fill two, completely opposite boxes with guys in a very close pick range. While they’re not similar players, they’ve very close in levels in that layer.

On if there was anything he was hoping to do but wasn’t able to, despite making 11 picks
We had 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. It’s funny, you’re starting to see patterns emerging in the last three or four years. We thought Billy [Armstrong] might be a guy who wanted to move up, he’s aggressive, and two people called us saying we know you like to move back, so people are getting a feel. Carolina, Montreal, us, a couple of other teams that seem to be in the vein of moving back. Now, there seem to be 3-4 teams who are in the vein of moving up. So, you saw a lot of picks that way. It’s pretty cool that is starting to become something. We could have moved back four more times in the first. We had a bunch of offers for 17, that seemed to be a pick that people wanted. Even when we moved back to 19, we had an offer. Obviously at 83 we had an offer. We did have an offer at 46 but we didn’t want to move. We did try to move up in the fourth, there was a particular player that was next on the list and the way our list went, there was one player left and 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, we offered two picks to move up in the fourth, the other team offered two picks and our fourth was higher and the other pick was higher and the really cool thing about it and the reason I’m not mad is that 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 made at someone for being honorable and keeping their word. A couple drafts ago, we had that exact same thing where we had made a deal with a team to move up and just as we were putting it into the NHL, they called us and said we got a better offer and our guy went before we could get him. It was kind of cool though that someone had the integrity. 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.