All the hype around Wednesday’s 3:00 p.m. ET roster freeze as a sort of de facto deadline seemed set to end in a real letdown; with just minutes remaining before the hard stop on all transactions took effect, the only notable player to change teams was Nick Bjugstad, a versatile, hardworking, and, let’s face it, unexciting player.
Then, at the 11th hour, Los Angeles Kings GM Ken Holland struck a deal to bring the top player available, New York Rangers star winger Artemi Panarin, to the West Coast in a move designed to maximize L.A.’s playoff chances in captain Anze Kopitar’s final season.
Trade details:
To #GoKingsGo:
Artemi Panarin (50% retained)
To #NYR:
Liam Greentree
Cond. 2026 3rd Rd Pick
Cond. 2028 4th Rd Pick
Panarin camp only presented LA as option. Panarin is expected to complete contract extension shortly with Kings, they had substantive talks leading
Does Panarin, who turned 34 earlier this season, still have the juice to transform a meandering Kings attack that ranks second-worst in scoring? Is Liam Greentree, the Kings’ now-former top prospect, a worthy centerpiece in the return for such a high-profile star? And will fans in either of America’s two most populous cities come away from this deal happy? Let’s dig into these questions and more in the latest edition of Daily Faceoff’s Trade Grades.
Los Angeles Kings
Receive:
F, Artemi Panarin, $5.82-million cap hit through 2026, $11-million cap hit through 2028
If you’ve been following hockey for any length of time, you know at least a little about ‘The Bread Man,’ the mercurial Russian playmaker who twice finished in the top five of Hart Trophy voting during a six-and-a-half-year stint in the Big Apple. Panarin’s time as a Ranger may have ended in the same sort of publicly announced teardown that initially paved the way for his arrival in New York, but he played some brilliant hockey along the way; one of the game’s truly elite creators, Panarin averaged 67 assists and 101 points per 82 games as a Ranger, a career year for just about anyone else. The entire list of players who collected more points than Panarin’s 607 during his Rangers career goes as follows: Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Nathan MacKinnon, Nikita Kucherov, and David Pastrnak.
If you’re going over the stats Panarin has accumulated in a long and (save for one notable mugging by Tom Wilson) healthy prime as an elite top-line scorer, you won’t find a downside to this deal for L.A. Despite the Rangers’ own offensive woes (sixth-worst scoring offense), Panarin has already piled up 12 more points (57) than Adrian Kempe, the Kings’ leading scorer, 19 more than Kevin Fiala in second, and, well, a lot more than everyone else. They need goals, and Panarin creates goals.
On the business side of things, Kopitar’s impending retirement means Panarin’s two-year, $11-million contract extension is no sweat for the Kings. The return isn’t prohibitive either; Greentree was L.A.’s lone top-tier forward prospect, but it would have taken some time for his power game to translate at the NHL level. Save for hardworking power forward Alex Laferriere, talented but frustrating center Quinton Byfield, and silky puckmover Brandt Clarke, the key cogs for the Kings are all fairly ancient; Hall-of-Fame defenseman Drew Doughty is 36, top goalie Darcy Kuemper is 35, Kopitar is a lame duck, and Holland didn’t sign a free agent younger than Joel Armia, 32. That means the Kings didn’t have time to wait around for Greentree (or a conditional third-round pick) to pan out anyway.
Panarin, still averaging more than a point per game at 34, better fits the timeline for the Kings, but … what exactly is the timeline for the Kings? Why is veteran executive Holland, still new to the L.A. job after taking over for Rob Blake last summer, so determined to double and triple down on a core that has shown so little evidence it can compete for the Stanley Cup? Will Panarin’s on-ice influence on Byfield, Laferriere, and Clarke be so great over the next two-and-a-half seasons that they become the guys who drag L.A. out of the doldrums? More likely, Panarin will help the Kings stay just good enough to avoid another rebuild, which will satisfy team president Luc Robitaille but drive an already frustrated fanbase nuts.
The Kings deserve credit for getting the only guy on the market who was a solid bet to unlock their anemic offense enough to capitalize on a third-place scoring defense. The Russian will likely be the best forward to change hands this trade season and should help L.A. secure a fifth-straight postseason appearance. That’s a win in the short term, but will it really make life after Kopitar any less daunting for this toothless, aging roster?
Grade: B
New York Rangers
Receive:
F Liam Greentree
$5.82-million retained cap hit for Artemi Panarin through 2026
Conditional 2026 third-round pick (second-round pick if LAK win a series)
Conditional 2028 fourth-round pick (if LAK win two series)
The pitchforks are out. You knew they would be. When Rangers GM Chris Drury made the organization’s second public rebuild (sorry, retool) proclamation in eight years, the first thought on the mind of every Ranger fan was what (or whom) Panarin, whose 607 points in red, white, and blue are the ninth-most in franchise history, could fetch in the trade market. Panarin may be long in the tooth, but far worse players have been traded for returns that helped kick-start successful rebuilds. On paper, what Drury received for Panarin is not that.
Greentree has been producing for OHL Windsor since he was 16 and is only 19 goals away from breaking the franchise record for career tallies. A big kid who has spent this season working on bringing his defense and physicality up to pro standards, he should be an AHL standout as a rookie next season. Still, if the Rangers were only getting one prospect back in this deal, their fans would have liked a household, A+ name. Greentree is more of a solid B: an average skater who’s too big and strong for the teenagers he’s currently beating up on and could take a few years to adjust to the pace of the NHL.
For the draft capital the Kings threw in to amount to more than a third-round dart throw, they’d need to win a series. Their most likely opponents, should they make it to the dance, are the Colorado Avalanche, Vegas Golden Knights and the same Edmonton Oilers who have beaten them in four straight (!) first rounds. So, a third-rounder it is. The lack of supplemental assets means there won’t likely be additional swaps that flesh out a Panarin trade tree over the next few years; what you see is what you get.
Drury is already being skewered all over the internet for essentially getting a first (where Greentree was selected in 2024, and where he’d likely be selected again in a redraft) and a third back for a player who has often been called the best UFA signing in league history. Yes, Panarin was out of contract, but so was Brock Nelson, a less productive player who netted the nearby New York Islanders a haul (Calum Ritchie, first, and third-round picks) just last year.
The difference, of course, is that, where Nelson had a limited no-trade list, Panarin had total veto power over any move. The dreaded ‘NMC’ is the cost of doing business with a player of his caliber in free agency. Panarin’s affinity for big markets means there’s no good reason not to buy the story floating around that L.A. was the only team he’d sign off on. If that’s true, Drury was limited to picking from the assets of one team that A) didn’t have many good ones in the first place and B) knew how hamstrung he was.
While Drury can’t be exonerated from the circumstances that brought him here (everyone knew Panarin wasn’t re-upping in New York), Panarin’s trade control gave L.A. a stranglehold on the player’s market. Getting a prospect in Greentree who has developed well in the two amateur seasons since he was drafted late in the first round, then, is not a total loss. That doesn’t mean it’s not a tough return to swallow for the millions of New Yorkers who have witnessed Panarin’s brilliance up close for so long.
Grade: C-
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