Los Angeles Kings' Cap Issues Aren't Going Away After Waiving Mike Richards

If the Los Angeles Kings were almost any other team, general manager Dean Lombardi would be drawing significant heat at the moment.

After all, the Kings were expected to contend for a championship this season. Currently, they aren’t even in a playoff spot. They have a host of expensive free agents to deal with this summer, and with minimal growth expected in the salary cap and a bunch of players signed to long-term, big-money deals, they also have little room to maneuver.

On Tuesday, Mike Richards, the owner of one of those long-term, big-money deals, cleared waivers.

Lombardi is definitely safe. He is, after all, the chief architect of the team that has won two of the last three Stanley Cups. But that doesn’t change the fact that he has some tricky maneuvering in front of him, maneuvering which will require the sort of ruthless decisions he’s been reluctant to make over the last several seasons.

Virtually every key member of the team signed beyond this season is inked to a long-term deal, either one that predates the Kings’ acquisition of the player (as in Richards' case) or one designed to keep the core of a contending team together. A number of those deals have become problematic for the club. Beyond Richards they include:

• Team captain Dustin Brown, who negotiated his own eight-year contract in the summer of 2013 with an annual cap hit of $5.875 million. Brown had just 27 points last season, has 19 this year and has underlying numbers significantly worse than the team average.
• Defenceman Slava Voynov, whose six-year, $4.17 million per season deal would be a great value if he were playing. He’s been suspended by the NHL for most of the year, following an arrest for domestic violence. The Kings have been getting cap relief, but the long-term implications are still unclear.
• Defenceman Matt Greene, who will be paid $2.5 million per season for the next three years despite playing only 13 minutes per game at even strength on a little-used third pairing.

The Brown and Voynov deals are excusable. Brown was coming off of a poor playoff performance but had been decent during the regular season for years, while Voynov’s problems are off-ice and could not have been predicted by the team.

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The decisions to re-sign Greene and not exercise a compliance buyout on Richards are much less defensible.

As noted in September, those moves were entirely out of step with mainstream analytical thinking. They seemingly came in a burst of post-championship sentimentality from Lombardi. Now Los Angeles is slated to spend $8.25 million per season for a long time on a third-pairing defenceman and a centre who appears AHL-bound.

That’s difficult in the here and now, but the real toll will come this summer, when the Kings will need to make decisions on a quartet of high-profile players: unrestricted free agents Justin Williams and Jarret Stoll and restricted free agents Tyler Toffoli and Tanner Pearson.

The defence is also in a state of flux, with Voynov’s future uncertain and current No. 4 defenceman Robyn Regehr a pending unrestricted free agent. The club will also have some lower-priority deals (notably Kyle Clifford, a pending restricted free agent) to get done.

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How much room does the team have to operate with?

Dhiren Mahiban of NBC Sports reports that if the Canadian dollar comes in around $0.80 U.S. the cap will be just under $72 million, which gives the Kings’ roughly $11 million to take care of all the problems above. Justin Williams alone might eat up half of that. They gain a little over $4 million if Voynov’s contract is voided, but if that happens, they also have to find a new second-pairing defenceman, too.

If the Kings had made the tough decisions last season to use a compliance buyout on Richards and find a cheaper third-pairing defenceman than Greene, they’d be in excellent shape. Instead, they opted to keep a winning group together regardless of the cost. That isn’t going to be an option this summer, and now the decisions for Lombardi and his management group are going to be much tougher.

Statistics courtesy of NHL.com. Salary information via NHLNumbers.com. 

Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work.