LOS ANGELES — Drew Doughty didn’t sleep as well as he would’ve liked Tuesday night. And, really, who ever does? But it must be especially difficult for the ever-energized, impulse-driven, not-exactly-gifted-with-patience Kings defenceman to kick-start the dream factory when he lies down at night, especially when he’s this close to the second championship of his young career.
“Yeah, it’s really tough to get a solid night’s sleep this time of year, to be honest,” Doughty said Wednesday morning before Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final. “It’s not that I’m nervous—I’m just crazy excited. I just want the game to start. I hate the waiting.”
And when the waiting was finally over—when he’d been through the media duties and the warmups and the stretches and the pre-game soccer ball keep-up and the speeches and all—it seemed that whatever the result of Wednesday night’s game would be was intrinsically linked to something Doughty would do on the ice. As if this hockey game could finish no other way than with Doughty’s performance at the centre of it.
And some of that is the product of opportunity. Doughty played more minutes than any of his teammates in Wednesday night’s Game 1 triumph over the Rangers; most of them against New York’s top line, which is bound to cause a guy to run into a dramatic moment or two. But much of it is also the breakneck, run-the-table style of play Doughty brings to this game. He’s not shy to stubbornly fire pucks through clogged shooting lanes or barrel ass-out into a neutral zone hip check or, if the mood strikes, tap dance his way off the point, puck cradled on the blade of his stick, and try to roof one past one of the best goalies in the world.
He did all three of those things Wednesday night—and so much more. His night began unfavourably, with a first period he would later characterize as his worst of the season. He was on the ice for both Rangers goals and gifted New York winger Benoit Pouliot a clean breakaway when he tried a toe drag just inside New York’s blueline while skating backwards, only to watch the puck slide off his stick and onto Pouliot’s, who carried it undisturbed into the Kings zone and beat Jonathan Quick easily high stick side.
It was that glaring blunder that put the Rangers in motion to what would eventually be a 2-0 lead just fifteen minutes into the game, which must have seemed like some sort of clerical error if you were following along on the scoresheet. Los Angeles was supposed to be the better team. None of that was supposed to happen.
And when the Kings charged back, of course it was Doughty evening the affair early in the second with a breathtaking, master class goal. One of those ones where it looks like he’s on roller skates while everyone else is barefoot. It felt foretold.
After he scored, on a goal that needs to be seen to be believed, Doughty crashed into the glass and screamed his lungs out, as he does, and his teammates mobbed him while the crowd let out a roar that was part nervous relief, part confirmed elation. Doughty did too. “After that bad turnover, I wasn’t happy with myself,” Doughty said after the game. “I didn’t want to do too much to try to make up for it but I knew I had to be a lot better player than I was on that play.”
And he was. When he wasn’t screaming at the referees or muttering profanely to himself on the bench, Doughty was playing strong, high-energy hockey. He jumped head first into Kings rushes, he shut down Rangers centreman Derek Stepan, and when he took an embellishment penalty midway through the third after going down a little too generously on a Rick Nash clutch, all he could do was bend over at the waist and grin.
“Yeah, I didn’t really control my emotions too well at that point,” Doughty said. “When I get angry I kind of turn it on. I try to throw my emotions in the right way. Sometimes I don’t.”
And that’s what you get with Doughty on the ice: supreme talent mixed with raw fervor that can produce astonishingly good results and some startlingly bad ones, too. You live with the possibility of everything going haywire because when it doesn’t it can seem like what you’re watching is magic.
There has been a great deal of attention paid to Doughty in this, the first week of the Stanley Cup Final. Endless questions about his desires and determination lobbed his way; countless paragraphs of glowing prose paid to his developing maturity; an awful lot of he’s-the-best-defenceman-in-the-world-I-don’t-care-what-you-say talk from the well-tailored hockey debaters flown cross-continent for this occasion.
And none of that is undeserved. He’s the most entertaining guy on the ice and with his goal Wednesday night he now has 17 points in these playoffs, which breaks the Kings record he set himself in 2012, which, you may remember, was the year he won his first Stanley Cup. Even putting that aside, it’s an awful lot of points for a guy who had just 37 in 78 games during the regular season. Doughty himself is at a loss to explain his production.
“I don’t know, maybe I’m just getting the bounces,” Doughty said, looking all of his 24 years as he tugged on his already-loose tie in a custom black suit with red lining over a white shirt he left unbuttoned at the top. “I try to do the same things during the regular season. I try to jump in with the offence and try to put points up. But sometimes it just doesn’t go that way.”
Which says it all about Drew Doughty. Things don’t always go in a positive direction. But what he does on the ice has gotten him and his team this far, three wins away from the only thing that matters. Three wins away from being done with lying awake at night, excited and waiting.