Kings Only Add Richardson to Their Roster

Well, still playing catch-up from my weekend, I saw that the Kings re-signed Brad Richardson to a new 1-year, $900,000 deal on Saturday.  I wasn't going to do this post straight-away until the Ilya Kovalchuk news was announced, but now that it is and it is not with the Kings that he signed, I can continue with this post.  Richardson was a restricted free agent with the Kings this Summer and possibly agreed to a deal below market value, hoping that management would snag the biggest prize of the free agent season.

On Sunday, the Kings also made four other signings, none of which are immediate roster names, including Richard Clune, Corey Elkins, Trevor Lewis and Marc-Andre Cliche. All three are forwards and will all get a shot at making the club in 2011.

Richardson was acquired by the Kings from the Avalanche back in 2008 and has he has found some regular ice-time in Los Angeles since the trade, playing in 81 games with the Kings in 2010, scoring 11 goals and adding 16 assists.  That was good enough to rank him 315th among all players, 217th among forwards in the year.  He is a bit more of a depth player on the team, but he's definitely earning his ice-time as he goes.

Forwards	Defense	Goalies
Anze Kopitar	Drew Doughty	Jonathan Quick
Dustin Brown	Jack Johnson	Erik Ersberg
Ryan Smyth	Rob Scuderi
Jarret Stoll	Matt Greene
Michal Handzus
Justin Williams
Brad Richardson
Scott Parse

The Kings had plenty of room to move, looking forward to the Kovalchuk deal, but now they will have some extra space to use on possibly some other talent at the moment. Right now, with the Richardson signing, the Kings have 16 players signed on for $44.3 million, just going over the cap floor. The club also has a buyout on the books for two-thirds of a million, but that is very inconsequential right now. The four other signings are all pretty small and should fill some depth gaps, if need be, when the time comes.

Much like the Canucks in the Mats Sundin talks a couple of years ago, the Kings really tried to put all their eggs into one basket for free agency in the Summer, missing out on some other talent that may have worked otherwise.  The Canucks did end up signing Sundin midway through the 2009 season, but since he was their only target, not much was getting done otherwise.  Now, the Kings have done the same with Kovalchuk and they have nothing to show for their efforts.  This could be a pretty big fail when it's all accounted for one year from now.