GM Lombardi confident in Kings' blueprint
The NHL is a copycat league. The success of one champion is often the model for the next.
This summer, the popular trend was to build with speed, a style of play which crowned the Pittsburgh Penguins as last season's Stanley Cup winner.
Yet, Los Angeles Kings general manager Dean Lombardi sees it differently. He's interested in winning his own way, and continuing to build on the Kings' black-and-blue reputation.
"I'm not into flavor of the month," Lombardi told Curtis Zupke of NHL.com. "We're going to get there a different way, but I don't see us changing our values and our identity."
It's hard to argue with a blueprint that led Los Angeles to two Stanley Cup wins in three years, capturing victory in 2012 and 2014.
The present challenge is getting back to the team's winning ways.
Los Angeles saw early elimination from last year's postseason, winning just one game before being brushed aside by in-state rival San Jose.
"We really got exposed in the playoffs," Lombardi said. "I also think we had some mental issues in terms of having dealt with success, and a good punch in the nose like we got in the playoffs hopefully woke us all up."
Part of that wake-up call will come with new captain Anze Kopitar, who takes on the captaincy from Dustin Brown.
Recently signing an eight-year, $80-million extension, Kopitar is obviously a primary piece of the Kings' core, alongside top blue-liner Drew Doughty and star goalie Jonathan Quick.
But Kopitar's extension aside, it was a quiet offseason for Los Angeles - that's to be expected from a club with less than $30,000 in cap space.
However, the team did manage to sign free agent winger Teddy Purcell to a one-year, $1.6-million deal. The 30-year-old tallied 43 points last season, split between the Edmonton Oilers and Florida Panthers.
Meanwhile, the team lost winger Milan Lucic, who signed with the Oilers - a tough loss for the Kings, who coughed up a first-rounder, goalie Martin Jones, and young defenseman Colin Miller for Lucic only a year earlier.
Going forward, the Kings will look to their core players and youth to rediscover their winning ways.
Los Angeles is counting on some of its young talent, namely Tanner Pearson and Tyler Toffoli, both 24 years old, to play a big role in the team's next wave of success.
"I think that one of the problems that we've had with our success is that thing I said four years ago," Lombardi said. "Whenever you've won, it's not recapturing the feeling, it's re-inventing the feeling.
"And that requires these guys now to establish their own identity, their own basis to lead and their own basis to get to the same place that Dustin (Brown) took us."