Todd McLellan calls out his own players, says some do not belong in the NHL.

Harsh comments from McLellan.

HockeyFeed
HockeyFeed
Published 4 years ago
Todd McLellan calls out his own players, says some do not belong in the NHL.
Carl Sandin/Bildbyran/Zuma

The Los Angeles Kings have had a very, very poor start to the season and the cracks may be starting to show. 

On Sunday night the Kings, currently sitting at the bottom of the Pacific Division, faced off against the Chicago Blackhawks, a team sitting firmly at the bottom of the Central Division, in a battle of two organizations desperate for a win. Unfortunately for the Kings however it looked like only one team was desperate for a victory on Sunday night with the Blackhawks totally dominating them on the scoreboard, eventually walking away with a 5 - 1 victory. 

It was no doubt an extremely frustrating display for head coach Todd McLellan who is now in his first year as a head coach with the organization, and he let that frustration show in his post game comments. McLellan absolutely blasted his roster following the game going so far to state that some of his players clearly no longer belonged in the National Hockey League. It was the kind of criticism that you simply just do not hear from an NHL head coach, or any head coach in North American pro sports for that matter, but McLellan felt perfectly comfortable letting loose. 

"This trip was good because it let us know that there's some players that probably can't play in the league right now," said McLellan.

As you can see McLellan did not name any of his players by name but it was quite obvious that he had some people in mind when he made his comments. To their credit, the Kings organization themselves have not distanced themselves from the comments made by their head coach and in fact have broadcasted that part of his post comments on their own social media, apparently endorsing what their frustrated head coach had to say about the quality of his current roster. 

Were it not for the catastrophic start to the season for the Detroit Red Wings you could easily make the argument that the Kings are far and away the NHL's worst team to start the season. As I stated they are currently last in their division with 4 wins and 8 losses thus far on the year and their -18 goal differential is a clear sign that they are a very bad team at this current stage of the season. Whether or not this will serve to light a fire under the Kings roster remains to be seen.


Source: