By the time the NHL's trade deadline finished on Friday, the Los Angeles Kings had made no moves, sticking to what they've said all season, their roster is their roster.
Several fans were upset watching division rivals bolster as the Kings sat on their hands
However, doing nothing was the right move from general manager Rob Blake. A panic trade in reaction to what was happening around them would have been a big mistake.
Kings Don't Have the Arsenal to Enter an Arms Race:
Teams were bolstering all around the NHL, but it felt like the Western Conference in particular entered an arms race this year.
Many of the deadline's hottest assets ended up in the West and at least five teams pushed themselves into Cup contention with their deadline moves. Six if you count the Vancouver Canucks acquisition of Elias Lindholm a few weeks ago.
The Kings simply didn't have the assets to enter into that race.
They're already without a second and third-round pick this season and can't afford to trade their first-round pick for the third year in a row.
They're also short on valuable prospects. Quinton Byfield and Brandt Clarke are, essentially, untouchable and no one after them would garner a significant return.
Arthur Kaliyev's name was circling quite a bit, but he wouldn't fetch much. Alex Turcotte is finally playing some solid hockey in the NHL but teams likely wouldn't take the risk on him.
That leaves them with a few B-level prospects at best like Martin Chromiak or Koehn Ziemmer to deal.
With a dwindling prospect pool, that didn't feel like a good option.
The only trade that would have been possible would be moving Matt Roy for help in another position, and it sounds like that might have been on the table.
Regardless, if you only have one piece you can realistically move to make a big splash, you can't enter an arms race.
Cap Situation:
This is the big one.
Even if the Kings wanted to sell off more future assets, they couldn't afford to.
Mikey Anderson and Adrian Kempe will be back extremely soon and Viktor Arvidsson will be back in the next week or two, leaving the Kings with almost no cap flexibility.
And again, no they couldn't have just kept Arvidsson on LTIR for the rest of the season.
Without trading another player, like Roy, who had a significant cap hit, a deal wouldn't have been possible.
This Isn't the Season to go All-In:
Lastly, the Kings made the right choice not going all-in this season. Trading away more future assets to try and chase a Cup the way some other teams have.
Could this team win a round? Absolutely.
Could they go on some Cinderella run and win the Cup? Maybe, it certainly isn't impossible, but you shouldn't mortgage your future on that big of a maybe.
When looking at the risk/reward of going all-in this season, the risk didn't make sense for the Kings.
Blake has received plenty of criticism this season, a lot of it fair, but the decision to stand pat at the deadline was a good one.
Now, maybe he was forced into that decision by previous mistakes and he shouldn't be given too much credit, but he didn't make another mistake at the deadline.