EDMONTON — Drew Doughty was seeing something. For two straight days.
His team’s Game 1 performance was completely unacceptable. The No. 1 defenseman on the Los Angeles Kings stewed and stewed about it.
They weren’t going to get run out of the rink again.
“That was huge,” Doughty told The Athletic after his team’s 5-4 overtime win Wednesday night to tie their series 1-1 with the favored Edmonton Oilers. “That felt so good. It was a little, I don’t know if ’embarrassing’ is the right word, but disappointing in the first game, getting smoked like that, and getting dominated. That was tough.
“We all took it home with us. A lot of us were still talking about it the next day and even this morning. We were determined to come out and play a better game. Right from the puck drop, we were a much better team. Everybody contributed tonight. It was a team win.”
Doughty led all skaters with 29:07 minutes of ice time in the game. No one else was even close. And they were, as always, hard minutes, matched up against Oilers superstar Connor McDavid for the most part, along with big minutes on both special teams.
Doughty took a pretty hard hit from Evander Kane in the second period but didn’t miss a beat. When he came out to chat for our interview after the game, though, he did admit, “I need to sit down.”
He could finally take a breather.
There’s a playoff warrior in Doughty who wasn’t going to allow his team to get pumped again. That was a good old-fashioned ass-kicking in Game 1. The score said 7-4, but it was truly tilted when the game mattered. And the Kings knew it.
They didn’t practice on the off day between games. They watched video. Talk about a horror flick. Rush chance after rush chance for the Oilers in Game 1.
And while Wednesday night wasn’t a low-scoring game, the Kings’ 1-3-1 system was way more effective in slowing down the Oilers’ dangerous playmakers, limiting chances and keeping them in the game.
That’s the recipe if the Kings are going to upset the Oilers in this series. The Oilers’ big guns are going to find the back of the net. The Kings are going to have to limit the damage and frustrate those Oilers stars as much as possible.
At the heart of it all on Wednesday night’s winning effort was the 34-year-old Doughty, scoring a late goal in the first and seemingly on the ice every second shift in the game.
The two-time Stanley Cup champion and two-time Olympic gold medalist was made for this time of year.
“He’s just such a big-game player,” Kings head coach Jim Hiller said when I asked him to describe Doughty’s impact on a night like this. “You know his history. You know the Stanley Cups. You know the gold medals.
“He’s just a guy you win with. Everybody who has ever played with him on all those teams just knows Drew, if it’s a big game, he’s going to be there. The organization is fortunate to have him as long as they have and still be able to play at the level he’s playing at.”
Darryl Sutter, Doughty’s coach from those two Cup teams, added via text message Thursday morning: “Absolutely loves the competition of being on the ice against the top forwards. Hard to believe that in a lot of ways, he’s still underrated in how good defensively he is. In the 1-3-1, he’s usually the D in the race/battle — first back for puck too, which takes a toll. But like last night, he loves it. His desire to excel and win is in the same category as Chris Chelios when we were together in Chicago.”
What gets Doughty out of bed 16 seasons into what will surely be a Hockey Hall of Fame career is very much this time of year. He patiently waited through a Kings rebuild. OK, maybe not always only patiently. It drove him crazy when the team was in its leaner years, turning over the roster. But he stuck around because he believed they could return to Cup contention.
What’s easy to forget is that the Kings got off to such a strong start back in the fall that some people fancied them a dark horse Stanley Cup threat, including many on The Athletic‘s staff. They were a team that could potentially hang with elite contenders.
But after a six-week collapse, head coach Todd McLellan’s firing, and, well, the final weeks of the season weren’t that consistent, either, they entered the playoffs very much a question mark. It was hard to say which version of the Kings we would see against the Oilers.
So you can forgive Oilers fans for feeling like they caught a break when the final night of the regular season saw the Kings win and the Vegas Golden Knights lose, which meant the defending Stanley Cup champs were off to play the No. 1-seeded Dallas Stars while Los Angeles once again found Edmonton as a first-round dance partner.
Don’t think the Kings players didn’t feel that. And, well, to be fair, they made the narrative all the worse by falling on their faces so badly in Game 1.
But if there’s a statement in Wednesday night’s victory, it’s that the Kings don’t have the intention to be a minor speed bump for the favored Oilers.
“No, no, we never believed that,” Doughty said with conviction. “A lot of people were doing it out that way. We’re going to lose in five. We’re going to get swept. Whatever it may be.
“But we’ve got a good team in here, man. We battle hard, we play both ways, and we believe in ourselves. That’s the biggest thing come playoff time, is believing in yourselves and in each other. You guys can say we’re the underdogs, but we don’t feel like the underdogs.”
And it goes without saying that in Doughty and Game 2 overtime hero Anze Kopitar, there’s Cup-winning leadership providing the experience and know-how that can calm a team down in an imposing atmosphere like Rogers Place in Edmonton. And the Kings did show resilience as the Oilers came back to tie the game twice Wednesday night to force overtime.
GO DEEPER
Kings leader and Game 2 hero Anže Kopitar conducts a master class in hockey sense
GO DEEPER
Kings finally dismiss Oilers in Game 2 with Kopitar’s OT goal: 5 takeaways
But beyond that obvious championship experience from Doughty and Kopitar, this Kings team is now in its third consecutive playoff series with the Oilers. The younger players on their team have developed their own playoff scars.
“Exactly,” Doughty said. “You always hear people say you’ve got to learn to lose before you can learn to win. We went through that before we won our Cups. We lost to Vancouver first round (in 2010). That’s the way we learned.
“So these guys here are learning what it takes. I think that showed up tonight. That’s a massive win. Going home 1-1 versus down 2-0, that’s huge.”
Huge because, to Doughty, while the Oilers are always a difficult team to play against, they are especially dangerous at home.
“I don’t want to say they’re a different team at home, but they buzz a lot more at home than they do on the road,” Doughty said. “I think that’s a huge win.”
(Photo: Codie McLachlan / Getty Images)
