Evaluating The 2026 Kings Draft Class w/ Director of Amateur Scouting Mark Yannetti

It’s that time of the year, Insiders.

Presenting a lengthy conversation with Mark Yannetti about the 2026 LA Kings Draft Class.

The Kings selected 11 players last month, the organization’s largest draft class in the seven-round draft era. The Kings added six forwards, four defensemen and one goaltender, as they added both quality and quantity to their prospect pool, a pool which has really thinned out over the years. As the Kings have traded future assets for NHL players, the system has certainly suffered as a result. In Elton Hermansson, the Kings got a desperately needed injection of top-end talent, one of the highest-ranked forward prospects in the draft in terms of his offensive qualities. Behind Hermansson was a smattering of different profiles, players with a wider range of projections but several who you can see the path for towards NHL games, as most independent draft evaluations have said.

Pulling selects from Yannetti regarding the players the Kings picked to provide some insight and evaluation into why the Kings went the way they did on draft day.

Elton Hermansson
When you’re picking later in the first, you don’t want to acquiesce and say, well, we’re just going to get a third line guy or we’re just going to get a a bottom six player, you really want to do better than that, regardless of where you’re picking, because we see it all the time. Guys are guys who will go later than 20 or 25 will still become [top-six players] and you’ve got to find that guy. You’ve got to hold yourself to that standard. Hermanson’s skill level alone is probably top six, top five in the draft, which is a really nice thing to add at 19 and then you know the good skating, good sense, and all that. Guys were very excited, the staff was very excited to get him……he has a little bit of that it factor. There’s a confidence, a matter of fact confidence, that just permeates him when you talk to him and that’s a really good thing when he’s a skill guy and you want him to be a scorer. You want that matter of fact, you want that confidence. There’s no bravado, it just comes out and Swedes are humble. As a one-eyed generalization, that’s one of the issues we have when we interview some of the Swedes is it’s hard to get them to talk about themselves, but it wasn’t hard with him. We had a very good talk, a very frank talk and that confidence certainly permeated the interview.

Liam Lefebvre
We had three scouts on our staff, that if we didn’t come out of the draft with this guy, if I had moved back, all that’d be left of me was an LA Kings golf shirt ripped in half. This was a guy that we had targeted at 46 or 49 and this was a high priority guy for a lot of guys on our staff. He’s big. He’s got really good skill. His sense is sneaky and undervalued. He’s got grit, toughness, he’s not afraid to fight. The level of hockey he played at a year ago and the strides he’s made, simply in one year, are astronomical and this is the type of kid who takes ownership of his development. He’s one of those intangible kids as well. I think this guy’s an undervalued guy, an under the radar guy. Dwight King was an under the radar guy and Matt Roy was an under the radar guy, Wayne Simmonds and those guys were under the radar guys. I’m not saying he’s going to be Wayne Simmonds but he’s got a lot of attributes that I think people slept on.

Adam Goljer
He’s an excellent skater, smart, he moves the puck really quickly. You have all kinds of different types of hockey sense, you’ve got progression based sense like a Doughty in his prime or a Carlson in his prime. You have a speed based sense like Makar and you can even go back to a Vlasic, which would be more of Goljer’s sense, which is just a very quick recognition, ultra-quick sort. Puck’s on his stick and it’s up to the forwards early, so they can build speed and get the puck with space. That’s kind of how Goljer’s goes. He would go more towards that Vlasic level of just fast, movement and the thing is, with his feet, he can start moving the play up ice with his feet. You see some of these guys pick their way up the ice and circle back and then they find the guy, which is great, it’s just different. He’s able to quickly separate, make a pass and the puck’s going North really fast. That’s kind of the thing that we like the best about him.

Blake Zielinski
He’s really smart. He’s got underrated skill. I mean, it’s funny, you look at all these guys in the USHL, they’re talking about as offensive guys and this and that and he was over a point a game. You look at some of the other guys that went earlier, they were just lower than him or slightly above him. So, in terms of production, he actually is a very productive player. He’s versatile in how he can produce. He’s got above-average sense, above-average touch, good skill, works really hard. His compete is excellent. He fits the the utility knife role, like he’s got a lot of kicks at the can. He could go as a two-way guy. There’s enough offensie there that he could go as an offensive guy. There’s enough backup game that he could go as a strictly defensive fourth line guy. His skating, the more he can improve his skating, the higher it will trend on the positive side.

Yegor Rybkin
Our goalie guys thought that this was someone who they really wanted to work with. He’s raw, but they like some of those foundational elements. 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 [Gold Star NHL Pre-Draft] camp and looking at them, there were a few guys at the camp that they really wanted to work with and Rybkin was one of them. The fact that he speaks excellent English certainly won’t hurt him in a development standpoint and the goaltending pipeline allows us to – I don’t want to say take a swing, because I don’t think you cross your fingers and say a prayer – there’s a lot of foundational elements that we liked. If we were going pick at 86, that would have been the pick. We were fortunate enough to get an offer, move back and pick up one more spot and still get him and some of the risk is taken out as well, because our goalie prospect pool is so deep.

Thomas Vandenberg
Yeah, certainly similar [to Zielinski]. Vandenberg is a better skater. They’re both complementary offensive players. Blake probably hass a little bit more pronounced and versatile offensive game, Vandenberg’s probably a little bit more opportunistic in his offensive game, a little bit more quickness based, a little bit more jumping on pucks or jumping to areas. They both compete really hard in terms of work ethic and pace. In terms of inserting yourself into the game, Blake would probably be a little bit more physical and that would probably be the biggest difference in the compete, but they’re both complementary offensive guys. They do it in a little bit different ways but they’re also both kind of utility tool players. They’re really good in a lot of different areas but the skating would be tilted in Vanderberg’s [favor].

Vertti Svensk
He’s an elite skater. He’s a top-tier skater in the draft. Arguably, on defense, maybe [Tommy Bleyl] would skate better than [Svensk] but in terms of straight-line speed and straight-line skating and separation, he’s probably in the top of the group. He’s definitely in the top tier of skating. He’s less offensive than some of those skating guys. Although he played a lot of games with the men, he wasn’t able to do it as much, but he’s a very good transitional player. He can skate it up the ice. He can separate from the first forechecker. He can bring the puck up the ice without losing speed, without causing guys to wait and he moves the puck well. He’s got to mature a little in his decision making, sometimes he’ll try to do a little too much, try to be a little bit too – I don’t want to say fancy, but a little bit. With his skating, you don’t need to bring as much risk into the game – kind of like Golier – get it and move it and then jump. When you have a guy with that one asset, you’re later in the draft, you’re not usually looking at a guy with a top tier asset in the draft, so that was very intriguing to us.

Giorgos Pantelas
There’s a lot he does well. He’s big, he’s a really good skater, he’s physical. There’s a heaviness to him, there’s a consistency to his physicality. He hits through people and when you’re looking at that defense-first guy, his game with the puck trends more towards a blend-type defenseman than what you typically see with with a defense first guy. Now, with that, he does try to do some things that he shouldn’t try to do. It brings some risk into the game which you wouldn’t see with a Mikey Anderson or a Matt Roy. That being said, he’s 17. Bring as much risk as you can into it now, try to get as good as you can with the puck now, try to learn what you can and can’t get away with now, because you’re not improving your skills when you’re 21 or 22 in the American League. You’re playing your role, fighting for icetime, fighting to get into the NHL.

Alex Kostov
The skating was a problem two years ago. It still needs to get better, but his skating was a problem two years ago and then a year ago it was better, it wasn’t good enough, but it was better, and then this year, you’re like, oh, damn, it’s not that much of a problem anymore. As a result, you see his game pick up and then you see a little bit more physicality from him because there are certain situations he couldn’t get into because his feet wouldn’t allow him to get there. So, you start seeing him be more of that 200-foot player, you start seeing have more of a rounded game, you start seeing him get more offensive production because he’s not two steps behind. He’s a step behind or he’s a half a step behind, or in this situation, he’s right there this time, he’s right where he needs to be……he’s got offensive tools. He can score, he can make plays and this year, you saw his skating get to a point where he was in position to take advantage of those tools.

Tobias Krestan
He was at the Berlin development camp in June. It’s similar to other teams have development camps for everything, we saw him on the ice there, worked with him. It’s similar to the Milstein camp, except we actually have some guys that are on the ice and have more interaction and we control it, so he was there. There was a familiarity with him just through that kind of circumstance and we’d seen him play. He’s a really competitive, compete first guy, hard work, drive on the ice, secondary skill, but he’s more of a North/South, go to the hard areas, compete in the hard areas and win in the hard areas type of guy.

Lucas Ambrosio
He’s got good size, he’s a decent skater, with Hockey Canada he’s been on the world under-18 team. He’s not one of those 6-3 slug type guys or project type guys, there’s some game to him……he’s a big guy who’s skates well enough, and certainly looks like his skating could can improve. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of technical issues there. He’s a big body, he hasn’t grown quite into it yet. He’s able to play at that pace, he’s able to succeed at that level and we saw him a lot in the OHL as well. So, all those things go into it. We didn’t draft him just because he played for Hockey Canada, but it certainly doesn’t hurt the guy. When you put it in the body of work, it’s certainly not a detriment to say he played well against the best guys and his peers. Hockey Canada values him, good programs usually value good people, good players.