The Los Angeles Kings clearly won the Alec Martinez trade

The Los Angeles Kings may not be the only team to trade away Alex Martinez.

When news broke that the Los Angeles Kings were trading Alec Martinez to the Vegas Golden Knights was kind of bittersweet.

Sure, the Kings are, were, and will continue to be bad for the foreseeable future, but after 13 years in Los Angeles, Martinez had become a bit of a Kings’ institution in the same vein as Dustin Brown, Anze Kopitar, and Jonathan Quick (more on that here). He was a fourth-round pick by the team all the way back in 2007, made his debut two years later for four games at the tender age of 22, and went on to bring the Stanley Cup back to LA in 2012 and 2014.

While every player has to move on from the team that drafted them eventually, either via free agency, waivers, a trade, or even retirement, Father Time is undefeated in finishing off professional sports careers. Losing a player like Martinez – even a slightly diminished version – felt like just another reminder that the Kings’ previous era of near-unprecedented success was coming to an end.

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I mean, come on, he literally scored the Kings Stanley Cup-winning goal back in 2014; he’s practically a hero to Kings fans.

To make matters worse, the Vegas Golden Knights explicitly targeted Martinez to put their championship push over the edge – vaulting the team up the NHL power rankings and placing the league’s newest team in the same weight class as the Kings of yore.

With that being said, the Kings didn’t just give away Martinez for free.

They say you can’t put a price on a good relationship, but landing a pair of second-round picks for a then-32-year-old with a year and a half left on his six-year, $24 million contract will bring up question marks and small quips in a hurry. With the Kings’ rapidly approaching an all-out re-tooling, why not try to land the next Martinez in either the second round of the 2020 or the 2021 NHL Draft?

Sidebar: Though the Kings didn’t technically use Vegas’ second-round pick on draft day – packaging it along with the 97th overall pick to move up to 45 – the team landed a pair of solid defenders in Helge Grans and Brock Faber who could be fixtures of LA’s defense for the next 13 years.

Over the course of his abbreviated tenure with the Golden Knights – a tenure made all the more abbreviated by the uniquely shortened circumstances of the 2019-20 regular season – Martinez appeared in 10 games as a top-four defensemen – recording two goals and six assists in the regular season and an identical two goals, six assists in the postseason.

Given that Martinez only recorded a single goal for the Kings over his (presumed) final 41-game regular season tenure with the team, that has to be considered a marked improvement.

Assuming things remain copasetic and Martinez again finds himself playing 21-plus minutes a night as the team’s second-line left defenseman once more, one could argue that the Golden Knights were justified to pay a ‘Kings Ransom’ for his services, but that rapidly isn’t looking like it’s going to be the case. No, if recent rumors are to be believed, it looks like Vegas may actually be looking to unload their 2020 trade deadline acquisition to get under the salary cap and make way for crown jewel free agency addition Alex Pietrangelo.

Is Pietrangelo a better player than Martinez? Most definitely. He’s three years younger, a prolific shooter, and had enough respect in St. Louis to be named a captain at only 27-years-old. But this isn’t really about Pietrangelo. Plenty of teams have a ton of quality defensemen and remain under the cap just fine – just ask the Nashville Predators.

This more has to do with Vegas playing their salary cap like one of their famous casinos, with the Wiseguy known as the NHL’s hard salary cap waiting to break a few ankles if they don’t get their money right.

Will there be a market for Martinez? Most definitely. I mean heck, I wouldn’t mind it one bit if he somehow made his way back to the Kings Patrick Marleau-style, but you’d best believe they won’t be getting two second-round picks back for a defenseman on the final year of his contract.

No, Vegas explicitly landed Martinez because they were willing to overpay to steal him away. If they’re now actively trying to ship him out of town, it’s highly unlikely they’ll be able to land a similar deal in the same ballpark as sellers.

Even if the Golden Knights are able to recoup a similar second-round pick to the one they shipped out to acquire Martinez in the first place, that still leaves the team with one fewer quality prospect because they exchanged a player like Helge Grans or Brock Faber for 30 games of action and a Conference Finals loss.

In that regard, the Los Angeles Kings won the trade, and it’s not even close.

For better or worse, every member of the Los Angeles Kings’ championship rosters will eventually be on to greener pastures – even the Kingsiest King of them all, Drew Doughty. Heck, if the franchise ever wants to reload their farm system with the type of quality players they surrendered to put their franchise over the edge, they sort of have to say goodbye to some favorites. All fans can really ask is that general manager Rob Blake extract as much value as he can from said players when their numbers get called – a feat he unquestionably did in exchange for saying goodbye to Alec Martinez.