Dustin Brown is in his sixth season with the Los Angeles Kings. That makes him one of the team's few elder statesmen and as qualified as anyone to theorize about why things finally seem to be looking up.
His notion is pretty simple actually. And yet the 25-year-old captain believes it offers the best explanation of why Los Angeles, with its young roster, has emerged as one of the league's most improved teams and a legitimate contender for the playoffs it has watched from the sidelines since 2002.
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| Dean Lombardi has patiently guided L.A.'s building program. (Getty Images) |
Except to those in the dressing room, Brown said.
"What we went through last year has made us grow together as a group," Brown said of the Kings late-season fade from contention. "The games we might have lost last year, the one-goal games, now we're starting to believe we can win those, and I think that's because if you look around the room, you see almost all the same guys in here."
Well not entirely. The Kings did dip into the primary free agent market for a change last summer to add forward Ryan Smyth and defenseman Rob Scuderi. Both went on the shelf within the past week, and the Kings lost 3-2 at home to Philadelphia on Wednesday in their first game without either. Scuderi is expected back in the next few days, well before Smyth.
Still, the presence of the veterans has had a big impact. It has helped talented youngsters like defensemen Drew Doughty, Jack Johnson and Davis Drewiske, goalie Jonathan Quick and, in particular, center Anze Kopitar, the league's leading scorer with 32 points through Wednesday, take their games to the next level.
"We know what we are capable of now, that if we had a bad game like we had last week in Atlanta [a 7-0 blowout], we can bounce back like we did the next night and win," Brown said. "It's a different type of confidence.
"Obviously adding Smitty and Scuds makes a big difference, but I think it's important that we're building around a core instead of changing a lot of players every year like when I first got here. That's the way it's been since Dean took over, and it's starting to pay off."
Dean is Dean Lombardi, the general manager who was hired in the summer of 2006 with a mandate to "stop puttering around," as he put it, and avoid the quick-fix attempts that had marked the organization's philosophy for much of its first four decades. Lombardi's resume included seven years of managing the San Jose Sharks, where his philosophy of drafting and developing created the foundation that has made the Sharks one of the league's most consistent contenders.
"It's a painstaking process, but I really don't think there's another way to do it," Lombardi said. "You can always be tempted to go out and try to fill holes, but if you want to build a culture of winning, you have to go back to the draft table, start from scratch and stick with it."
That's not easy for a team playing in a market that demands star power and feels the added pressure of seeing its junior rival down the road in Anaheim win a Stanley Cup first. The Ducks took the big prize in Lombardi's first season with the Kings, creating the kind of angst among the fan base that could have easily derailed the strategy.
Los Angeles already had some prime young talent in Brown, Kopitar and Alexander Frolov and a stockpile of high draft picks, assets that might have been converted into players who could provide some immediate product improvement. Instead the organization decided to stay the course.
"It was a good test for ownership because this team has been around a lot longer [than Anaheim] and the fans were frustrated," Lombardi said. "We understood that, but the reality is it shouldn't matter whether guys down the street or from Boston win it. You can't let circumstances dictate what you do."
Not if you're taking a longer-term view of things, like the Chicago Blackhawks, who reached the Western Conference finals last season with 13 of their draft picks since 2002 in the lineup, or the Pittsburgh Penguins, who took advantage of several lean years to deepen their reserve of young talent and then add key pieces en route to winning the Stanley Cup last season.
The Kings have been following a similar path and have suffered the pains of the process. But on the inside, the organization began to see signs of progress under new coach Terry Murray, who drilled home the importance of playing without the puck and saw Los Angeles move from the bottom to the top half of the rankings in defense. Now with a lineup that includes seven draftees, other players signed after being bypassed in the draft and one of the league's top offenses, the progress is apparent.
"You could see that it's been building here for a while, going in the right direction, and with some of the young talent here, it's only a matter of time before you get the right combination," said Scuderi, who left the Stanley Cup champion Penguins to sign with the Kings. "If we play the right way every night we can be dangerous. The biggest thing is for the guys in here to realize it."
Blueblood1957 
