(Photo by Jeff Vinnick/Getty Images)

“I remember when we drafted him and we took him in the fifth [round], another team wanted to take him in that round,” Lombardi noted. “The guy came up me, a Russian guy that I knew who played in the Summit Series in 1972, a really good guy. [Evgeny Zimin] scouts for Philadelphia.

"He said, ‘this kid’s like [Igor] Larionov.’ I said, ‘C’mon, Evgeny. There’s no way. He said, ‘trust me. This guy sees the game like Larionov.’ I said, ‘OK, we’ll see.’”

“I had Igor, and Igor is a genius,” Lombardi added. “The irony is that they’re from the same town and Igor has kind of helped this kid. So he’s not Igor, but there are some similarities in the way they think the game and simplify the game.

"Because if you play the game at that level intellectually, you don’t have to create highlight films. They move the puck at the right time, they understand the relationship between space and coverage and they just make the right play.”

Nevertheless, Lombardi said that as good as Loktionov is, no one should expect a highlight reel on skates.

“It’s not that they’re going to bring you out of your seat and [they’re] going to be on ESPN’s highlights,” Lombardi explained. “But if you really know the game and appreciate the subtleties, you go, ‘wow, is that smart.’”

“It’s nothing that brings you out of your seat, and there’s a lot of that in this kid, but he has to learn...he’ll be back here in another month [for the Kings annual development camp]—I just love to see the cultural thing where I can see that he’s grown culturally by being in Windsor,” Lombardi elaborated.

“These are all the things that go on behind the scenes [in terms of] creating hope. When you see things like this, it’s pretty good and you watch’em grow right in front of you.”

As Lombardi alluded to when he talked about the role Futa and Yanetti played in drafting Voynov and Loktionov, his scouting and development staff appears to have finally hit full stride.

“We still had to make some minor adjustments,” Lombardi explained. “Like I said, when you bring in 35-40 people, some are going to work [and] some aren’t. But I’m really happy with where the amateur [scouts] are.

"We still have to make some adjustments with the regional area, but the core—I remember two years ago when we first put this together right up until draft day to put together our movements. It was a fire drill. We got through it, but that’s not the way to do things.”

“This year, we look back—we were sitting there after the combine and I said, ‘you know where we were two years ago?’ We all laughed [about the improvement between then and now] in terms of where our list was, how prepared we are, how we had already been in the rinks—we had already interviewed every person we met at the combine before we even got there,” Lombardi elaborated.

“That’s part of the culture where our guys are working the trenches.”

Indeed, it sounds as if Lombardi now has the scouting and development staff he envisioned—or close to it—when he joined the Kings three years ago.

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