Now that Anze Kopitar has retired, it's time for Quinton Byfield to step into the spotlight as the Los Angeles Kings' top center. But is he ready for the primetime matchups?
As with a lot of the top prospects drafted into the NHL around COVID-19, Quinton Byfield certainly took a long time to reliably flash the skill that got him taken No. 2 overall in 2020.
He played just 99 games across his first three years in the league and put up a total of just 8 goals and 25 assists for 33 points. Granted, he was still only 20, but it started to feel to ask questions about his ceiling.
The good news, for him, was that he would only ever top out as the No. 2 center on the Los Angeles Kings thanks to the presence of future Hall of Famer Anze Kopitar. Even as Byfield found his game a bit and started being a consistent 20-goal, 50-point center, there was never a heavy lift for him in terms of defensive responsibilities because Kopitar, at an advanced age, was the Kings' matchup guy, as he should have been.
But now that Kopitar is retired and the Kings will retire his jersey this coming season, it now becomes incumbent upon Byfield to take the big step in his career that his draft position implicitly promises.
If the Kings are going to remain even vaguely competitive, they will need Byfield to find that extra gear in his game that he only occasionally flashed through the first 339 games and parts of six seasons in the NHL. The problem is that this is difficult to predict.
This past season was the first of his career in which he averaged more than 20 minutes a night, and that was with him checking in at 20:01, nearly a minute and a half higher than the previous year, which itself was up more than two minutes from 2023-24.
Those 20 minutes a night were his first time playing more than Kopitar, but his deployment in terms of most common opponents was a little all over the place.
The most common forwards he lined up across from were guys like Connor McDavid and Kirill Kaprizov, but those are just the biggest-minute guys on the teams he plays regularly. More often, he was getting the No. 2 centers on a lot of teams, like Mason McTavish, Yegor Sharangovich, and Roope Hintz, instead of Leo Carlsson, Nathan MacKinnon, or Wyatt Johnston.
Overall, his underlying numbers are good, but that's mostly away from the kinds of guys he's going to match up against as the Kings' No. 1 center this season.
We did, however, get 15 games of sample size of what the Kings look like without Kopitar this season, because he missed four straight games in October and 11 straight in January.
During those stretches, Byfield saw his ice time jump so little as to not be worth mentioning (20:03 per game), his production dropped (3 goals and 8 points), and his underlying numbers were, shall we say, mixed.
When Byfield was on the ice at 5-on-5 for those 15 games, the Kings got 46 percent of the shots with 48 percent of the expected goals, and got outscored 7-6. The Kings went 6-4-5 in those 15 games, but only two of those wins were in regulation, and only one was against a team that later made the playoffs.
Obviously, we're talking about small samples with lots of extenuating circumstances, not the least of which is that the Kings didn't yet have Artemi Panarin to play next to Byfield. But that, plus the fact that Byfield has been sheltered for most of his career, is not a good long-term indicator for the soon-to-be 24-year-old's ceiling.
That said, a Byfield ascendancy isn't impossible, either. The Kings have certainly gone out and gotten offensive help, which should provide a sizable production boost over the help Byfield got last year from his most common linemates, Alex Laferriere and Kevin Fiala.
Kopitar also got a lot more power-play time that will probably come Byfield's way instead. Given that he's routinely put up 50 points playing next to that caliber of player and deployment, there may be an extra level he can find to become, perhaps, a 30-goal scorer who can maybe threaten 65 points.
Does that, plus mediocre defensive play against a level of competition he hasn't regularly faced before, mean he's a true No. 1? Probably not. But can he be one of the top 30 or 25 centers in the league? Yeah, that feels about right.
Doesn't mean it moves the needle for the Kings or quiets the doubters all that much, but it feels like Los Angeles is about to have bigger problems anyway.
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