The Los Angeles Kings put themselves in a precarious situation with the salary cap last summer when they acquired Pierre-Luc Dubois and took on his $8.5 million cap hit.
Heading into the 2024 offseason, the Kings are still trying to navigate that cap situation while improving upon a roster that survived just five games in the playoffs.
With CapFriendly updating their numbers for next season, now seemed like the perfect time to look at the Kings' cap situation.
To start, the Kings have seven forwards, five defensemen and one goalie signed for next season. With their currently signed players, they have $19.9 million to fill out the rest of their roster.
Assuming they want to carry 23 players next season, they must spread that $19.9 million across 10 players.
We'll assume that two consistent NHLers will be re-signed; Quinton Byfield and Jordan Spence. There's been no word on either player's extension, but Byfield is guaranteed to return and Spence seems likelier than not.
It's hard to predict a number value for those two so we'll guess a $5 million cap hit for Byfield and a $1.7 million cap hit for Spence. Byfield's number is a total guess, while Spence's number follows the contract Sean Durzi signed two summers ago.
That brings the Kings' cap to $13.2 million for eight players.
The next assumption will be on internal options to replace current roster players. We'll promote Brandt Clarke, Alex Turcotte and Akil Thomas to the NHL full-time.
Clarke remains on his entry-level contract carrying a cap hit of $863,333, while Thomas and Turcotte are both RFA's, we'll guess they sign a contract similar to Gabe Vilardi's in the summer of 2022, they'll carry a cap hit of $825,000.
That brings the Kings to roughly $10.69 million to spread across five players, a manageable number given they're mostly filling bottom-six spots.
However, their situation in net does complicate this. Do they want to run it back with budget goaltending again? David Rittich is re-signed at $1 million and Cam Talbot expressed interest in returning, likely at a low cap hit.
Publicly available data shows that Talbot and Rittich were excellent for the Kings, however, as Ed Egros explained in a recent AlltheKingsMen episode, internal analytics paint a much different picture, especially for Talbot.
The other wrinkle in the goaltending situation is a potential move away from the 1-3-1, for all of its faults, it is a goalie-friendly system that severely limits high-danger chances.
If the Kings move away from that and give up more chances, budget goaltending is more likely to be exposed.
They could allocate a significant portion of that remaining $10.69 million into goaltending, but the free-agent market for goalies doesn't look great this summer.
Your best options are Ilya Samsonov and Kaapo Kähkönen, not significant upgrades over Talbot.
The Kings could make a run at someone like Linus Ullmark or Juuse Saros but are severely limited in their tradeable assets without someone waiving their no-movement clause.
Some people have suggested putting Erik Portillo in net next season, however, Rob Blake seemed to indicate Portillo needed another season in the AHL during his exit interview.
It's very difficult to predict where the Kings go in net this summer, but for the sake of this exercise, let's assume they spend $3.5 million in net.
That brings us to $7.187 million for four players, mainly looking at bottom-six forwards.
Blake also indicated the team wants Trevor Lewis back, so we'll throw him in on another league minimum contract, bringing us to roughly $6.412 million.
That's to fill Blake Lizotte and Carl Grundstrom's spot on the fourth line and an extra forward.
That's more than enough money to fill out your fourth line and gives the Kings room to potentially re-sign Arvidsson or find a replacement in free agency.
I don't think the Kings re-sign Roy with that space, assuming that Roy's next contract comes in around that $6.4 million point.
The Kings aren't in a terrible position with their cap this summer, but they need to be smart with their moves.
If they're willing to take someone away from the roster, they could even acquire a big-name goalie if they want to.
I wouldn't expect a big shakeup from this team, however, they do have the option of shuffling things around, particularly in the bottom half of the lineup.
They can also look to upgrade on Andreas Englund at LD3.
It's important to remember that a lot of this is speculation, especially when predicting contracts but I do expect the Kings to fall around that $10.6 million mark heading into free agency, needing a starting goalie and their bottom-six filled out.
Some shrewd moves could see the Kings finally take that next step.