The Los Angeles Kings roster is nearly set.
They have roughly $10 million in cap space but Quinton Byfield, Jordan Spence, and potentially Arthur Kaliyev, all need new contracts, limiting their options.
Further limiting those options is a depleted free agency pool.
Most of the work has already been done, all of the big fish are off the market, and in the view of some, LA missed the boat on improving this summer.
Warren Foegele, Darcy Kuemper, Tanner Jeannot and Joel Edmundson range from good, to not-so-good as off-season additions.
There is sense in adding gritty, hard to play against, players to a core group LA feels have the talent to carry the load offensively, but another forward couldn't hurt.
Preferably a forward who can score goals and is right handed.
That's where the options really start to fall off.
James van Riemsdyk is still available and with the right usage, fourth-line minutes and net-front power play usage, he could be a decent addition.
However, as a left it's probably not worth a look for LA.
Players like Mike Hoffman, Max Pacioretty and Filip Zadina are all out there too, players who can score at a decent clip. But again, all lefties.
This leaves Daniel Sprong as the only real option.
A speedy winger who averages 20 goals and 36 points per 82 games, mostly playing bottom-six minutes, Sprong could add a goal scoring thrust to this team.
In a bigger role, maybe playing with Phil Danault and Trevor Moore, it's not unrealistic to expect Sprong's scoring to increase a little bit and he's a power-play threat.
Most important, he's also a right shot, giving the Kings options on the power play outside of Alex Laferriere, Akil Thomas and Trevor Lewis.
Sprong would be almost the antithesis of what Rob Blake has targeted this summer though.
He's a little undersized, not physical and suspect defensively. However, he puts pucks in the net better than any of Blake's additions this summer.
At this point, I expect Blake to stick with what they have, but he should keep an eye on Sprong.
He'd likely come cheap and would inject some of the speed and skill that was lost this summer.
Of course, maybe Blake has a lot of faith in some of the young players to be better than Sprong.
I can buy that, but those young players need more than a fourth-line roles to prove it.