Rob Blake will not return to his position as general manager of the Kings next season, as he and the Kings have mutually agreed to part ways.
Blake, 55, was a Hall of Fame defenseman for the Kings, later becoming their assistant GM after the departure of Ron Hextall in 2013 and then ascending to the GM role after two-time Stanley Cup champion Dean Lombardi was dismissed in 2017.
In eight seasons under Blake, the Kings made the playoffs five times but never once advanced beyond the first round.
During his first season, with a roster largely inherited from Lombardi, the Kings excelled defensively but were swept from the playoffs by an expansion team, the eventual Western Conference champion Vegas Golden Knights.
Tasked with improving the Kings offensively and on the power play, Blake reached out to Russia, signing former Atlanta Thrashers and New Jersey Devils star Ilya Kovalchuk. The three-year arrangement lasted a season and change, basically to the point where it became financially convenient to terminate Kovalchuk’s contract.
The Kings cratered into a forced rebuild and while initially their forays into the undrafted free-agent prospect pool and the process of moving veterans for futures yielded some promising results, two more Blake overreaches dampened their positive impact and allowed dead ends to proliferate.
While Trevor Moore was a product of those acquisitions, the Kings squandered or undersold asset after asset in many other instances. That was particularly true after they paid handsomely to foist part of the contract of goalie Cal Petersen, whom Blake overvalued and paid prematurely, and to acquire Pierre-Luc Dubois, who went from purportedly elevating the Kings to Stanley Cup contention to being jettisoned cargo from a ship he threatened to sink.
Ironically, Blake returned this season to the sort of effective, far-from-flashy moves that helped him bring the Kings out of the Pacific Division basement and into the playoffs in 2021-22.
Then, his understated additions of Phillip Danault, Alex Edler and Viktor Arvidsson helped vault the team to new heights. With the Kings’ organizational depth severely diluted by last year’s missteps, Blake added Warren Foegele, Joel Edmundson, Tanner Jeannot and, at the trade deadline, Andrei Kuzmenko to help the Kings recover from a disappointing campaign last year during which Todd McLellan was sacked as head coach.
Yet Blake had been operating under a mandate to make the playoffs last season, which the Kings did, and a stated goal to advance beyond Round 1 this season. Not only did the Kings fail to accomplish that, they lost four straight playoff games to be reverse swept in their fourth consecutive elimination at the hands of the Edmonton Oilers.
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