For Kings’ Doughty, it’s the mind that matters
LOS ANGELES— When Drew Doughty was a kid he was a centre, and he was a good one, but one year his team was short of defencemen, so they asked him to be a defenceman. He was 12, maybe 13. It came so easily to him.
“I wasn’t too keen on it at first,” Doughty, the L.A. Kings defenceman, said one day before Game 2 of the Stanley Cup final against the New York Rangers. “It worked out pretty well.”
Watching Doughty is a pleasure, in part because he makes hockey look easy. It’s not that he doesn’t work, though his 6-foot-1, 210pound body doesn’t always appear to be carved from marble as much it is seems to be mounded from earth. In a golf shirt and slacks his arms are a little skinny and his belly doesn’t quite disappear and he looks like a weekend golfer, not a hockey player.
But on the ice, boy. On the ice he looks like he can see hockey’s code, and crack it.
“Yeah, that’s the one thing I think I’ve always had, is instincts,” says Doughty, 24. “I never had the best shot on my team, I was never the fastest. I’ve never been on a team where I’ve been on the top of any one attribute. But my mind — I think the game well, I study the game well, and I’m always watching other players to figure out how I can get better.
“That’s a lot of my game. I’m always about reading the play, and sometimes that can get me in trouble, because I’m assuming a guy’s going to do something and maybe he doesn’t do it. But for the most part I make the right reads, positionally I’m in the right spot, and I can read off my instincts.”
It’s a rare and keen thing, Doughty’s hockey mind. At the 2010 Olympics he was 20 and he made one mistake, at most. In Sochi he was Canada’s leading scorer and probably its best defenceman on our nearly perfect, world-crushing gold medallists.
And in the playoffs Doughty has provided brilliance, again. He has those centre’s hands, that opponent-crushing butt, those skates that seem to send him sideways, as teammate Willie Mitchell likes to say. Willie says Nik Lidstrom skated like that, too. And Doughty has that beautiful hockey mind, along with the dangers it can still create. “What makes him special is what you can’t teach, what you can’t see happen,” says Kings captain Dustin Brown, who has played with Doughty throughout his entire six-year career. “You look around the league at the really special players and it’s not that they were taught how to do something at an early age; it’s another level. For him, the game moves really slow for him. Unfortunately, I don’t have that. “The other thing is it’s his competitiveness that makes him great. There are guys who are really skilled and have that, but don’t have that yearning to win, and you can see the difference.” Doughty says that he knows right away if he’s got it. Some games he doesn’t feel good and makes simple plays, trying to find that zone, and some games it’s right there, and Doughty plays on the border of his own possibilities. He says he gets in trouble when he tries to do too much, but that’s the danger of where he lives.
“He just kind of lives in the moment rather than thinking too much,” says Kings forward Dwight King. “Instinct. He sees what he sees, and he trusts himself to make the right decision, and probably 99 times out of 100, he’ll make that decision.
“Most players at this level, you think the game well enough to make plays if you could, if you had that ability. But you can’t always carry it out — there’s percentages, and guys like that have the ability to do it more consistently. I think it feels easier for him than most players. That’s what comes to him.”
That was visible to all in Game 1 against the Rangers. In the first period, Doughty was moving to his left and tried to drag a puck with him, but was picked by Benoit Pouliot, who took off and scored. In the second period, Doughty took a slow and pretty pass from Justin Williams on a rush, knocked it between his own skates and back to his stick, dragged the puck again — “maybe half an inch from being the same play again,” says Mitchell — and beat New York goalie Henrik Lundqvist with a cleverly placed shot.
Instinct, all of it. It was Doughty at his best, flying somewhere above the usual hockey clouds.
“It feels like you’re just playing with all the confidence in the world,” Doughty says. “Every time you get that puck . . . you want that puck on your stick the entire time, and every time you do get it, you feel like you can make something happen. When you’re playing with that confidence, it usually does happen.”
Not for everyone, mind you, because not everyone’s a natural. Just the lucky, and the great.