Understanding the LA Kings Training Camp Roster Setup
Training camp rosters for NHL teams like the Los Angeles Kings are a moving target. They change from day to day as players report, get cut, or get assigned to the minors. If you are trying to track down who is actually on the ice at any given moment, you need to understand how these lists get built and where the gaps usually are. The LA Kings training camp roster typically falls in the 75 to 80 player range when you count everyone who shows up. That includes the 25 to 30 NHL-caliber players the team brings in for camp, maybe another 20 or so prospects, and a handful of invitees trying to make a roster. Coaches go through them systematically over the first week or so. The real cuts happen around day four or five, when they start sending people back down to the Ontario Reign or outright waiving a few guys.
La Kings Training Camp Roster Where to Find It
The official roster comes out through the team website and the NHL press releases. But the version on NHL.com or the club site is usually the final cut roster after camp wraps up. If you want the day-by-day breakdown during camp, you have to dig a bit. Beat writers at outlets like the LA Times or Kings-specific blogs will post practice reports that name who was on the ice each day. Those are the most accurate snapshots while camp is happening. I used to just scrape the team site directly, but they changed their roster page layout a couple years ago and it broke my old method. What works now is checking the practice reports from beat writers and cross-referencing them with the NHL's daily transactions page. That will tell you who got sent down, who got recalled, and who got waived. It takes about ten minutes a day while camp is running and keeps you ahead of the official announcements which can lag by a day or two. One thing people miss is that the training camp roster is not the same as the preseason roster. The camp roster has more guys. The preseason roster is the trimmed version that actually plays in exhibition games. About a week into camp, the coach cuts it down to 23 or so for the first preseason game, then trims again before the regular season starts. If you are building a database or tracking players, you need to know which list you are looking at or you will waste time chasing guys who were cut two days earlier.
How to Build Your Own Training Camp Tracker
The most useful thing I have found is a simple spreadsheet that tracks each day of camp. Columns for date, practice time, forwards on ice, defensemen on ice, and goalies. You also want a separate tab for transaction log so you can see who got moved when. This takes about 20 minutes to set up and about five minutes per day to update during camp season. For data sources, the NHL.com prospect pages are decent for the lower-league guys. The Kings' own site has depth charts but they do not always update them immediately after camp moves. Twitter is honestly the fastest source for real-time updates. Not the official accounts, but beat writers like Matt Larkin or staff from Kings Nation. They post practice line combinations within an hour of the ice time ending. A counter-intuitive thing about these rosters: the highest-profile prospects are not always the ones getting the most evaluation minutes. Coaches tend to burn their best prospects early and often in camp, then use the later sessions to evaluate marginal players fighting for the last roster spot. So if you are looking at who is getting top-line work in the first two days, that tells you more about who the team values than the final roster numbers will.
Get the Full Details
Another thing beginners get wrong is assuming that being invited to camp means a player is close to making the team. That is not true. Teams routinely invite twelve or fifteen extra bodies just to fill lines for scrimmages and practice. Some of those guys have no realistic path to the roster. The actual cutoff is usually tighter than people think, and it is determined more by how the last week of camp goes than by any ranking the team released beforehand. If you want a downloadable roster after camp, the team publishes the final preseason roster and then the opening night roster. The NHL site archives both. There is no single official document that captures the entire camp progression, which is why building your own tracker is worth the effort. You will also notice that the LA Kings tend to be slower than most teams about releasing formal camp invites. Other teams publish theirs a week or two before camp starts. The Kings often just announce who showed up through practice reports, so you are working from incomplete information until the first official list drops. The main bottleneck in tracking this stuff is that practice line combinations are not always released publicly. Sometimes you can figure them out from video or photos, but not always. When that happens, the transaction log becomes even more important because it at least tells you who stayed and who left. The spreadsheet method I described handles that well because you can flag uncertain entries and correct them once official info comes out.
One workaround I developed for the missing practice line data is to check the Ontario Reign's social media. Since the Reign are the Kings' AHL affiliate, many of the camp invitees end up there if they do not make the team. The Reign often announce their camp invitees and practice lineups, which gives you a secondary tracking source. It is not perfect but it fills a lot of gaps, especially for the younger prospects who get sent down early.
