Up in the box at Staples Center reserved for the visiting team’s management, faint hope gave way to grim resignation as the seconds ticked by in game four of the Western Conference semis. L.A. Kings goaltender Jonathan Quick was on his way to turning aside 22 of 23 shots, each stop a little twisted dagger in the hearts of the St. Louis Blues and their executives. Los Angeles captain Dustin Brown was leading the way with a shot through traffic that gave the home team a 2–1 advantage in the second period. The Blues were dominating in the third, generating a quality scoring chance seemingly every shift, but Quick, posts and bounces conspired to thwart the visitors. On St. Louis’s best opportunity, L.A. centre Anže Kopitar dove on a loose puck rolling on the edge of the crease, allowing Quick to cover up.
The situation was tense but, with the Kings having won the first three games of the series, hardly suspenseful. And when Brown scored an empty-net goal in the last minute, GM Doug Armstrong and the rest of the Blues brass fell silent. St. Louis had rocketed up to the second seed in the conference but, like the Presidents’ Trophy–winning Vancouver Canucks in the opening round, the Blues had run into a goaltender playing lights-out and a resilient team in front of him—an L.A. Kings squad like none before.
Over their 45-year history, Kings rosters have featured a dozen Hall of Famers. With the exception of Luc Robitaille and Marcel Dionne, they are, like Wayne Gretzky, players who put in a few seasons in L.A. but are better known for what they did elsewhere. (See Steve Shutt, Jari Kurri and Harry Howell.) There has been nary an aging lion in the Kings’ lineup this season.
The Kings have occasionally mattered since the NHL awarded a franchise to Canadian-born entrepreneur Jack Kent Cooke in the original round of expansion back in 1967. Before playing a game, L.A. was the splashiest of the new teams. The Kings’ home was the Fabulous Forum. Their purple and gold colors shook up the staid Original Six. And in the late ’60s, Cooke kicked around the idea of buying Bobby Hull, the best known player in the game at the time, from Chicago for the unimaginable sum of $2 million. It never came to pass, but it was evidence of a central tenet of Cooke’s philosophy, and, until recently, of all L.A. owners: the power of star players to sell the team to the market. But that is no longer the case. These are not your father’s L.A. Kings; there are no sure-fire Hall of Famers and no big stars, just a team built to win.
Dave Taylor, St. Louis’s director of player personnel, was sitting next to Armstrong watching their team lose. Everyone in the box took it hard, but Taylor’s grief was different than his cohorts’. L.A. had been his team as a player and an executive. His name and his retired No. 18 hang from Staples Center’s rafters, recognition of a 1,111-game NHL career, all of it for the Kings.
The banner was in his line of sight from the box. So was the team smiling in the handshake line, a team that he played a key role in building. “There are going to be a lot of young players who are going to be a lot better known after this series than before the playoffs started,” Taylor says. Though the Kings let Taylor go in 2007 after 10 years in their front office, nine as GM, he has seen a lot of this team. Dozens of times over the course of a winter, he’ll pull his car out of the driveway in Tarzana, Calif., and drive 25 miles to Staples Center, where he’ll take a seat in the upper bowl to scout visiting teams. When Taylor saw Quick stone the Blues and others this season, he was taken back to the Kings draft table in 2005 when his management team decided to use their third-rounder on an athletic but inexperienced prep-school goaltender out of Connecticut. When Taylor saw Kopitar working his two-way game, he recalled how the 2005 first-rounder from Slovenia stepped into the lineup at 19 after only one full season in the Swedish Elite League. And when he saw Brown, the Kings’ captain and longest-serving current player, he saw an industrious and honest, if not physically impressive, forward who overachieved.
Taylor won’t say that he saw the Kings’ breakthrough coming this spring, but he, like other NHL executives, did see signs of the team’s rise. “The team made some big moves [this season] bringing in [forwards Mike] Richards and [Jeff] Carter and signing [defenceman] Drew Doughty to a long-term contract, but this franchise has made a few big moves over the years,” Taylor says. And while it was conventional wisdom that GM Dean Lombardi would be fired if the Kings missed the playoffs, Taylor maintains it was a commitment to something more than the status quo that has positioned the team for this breakthrough and maybe the Stanley Cup.
Cooke missed out on Hull, but he did manage to acquire a player who had racked up more points in his first four seasons than any player in NHL history at that point: Dionne. Cooke worked what was then hockey’s greatest squeeze play, using Dionne’s threat to jump to the WHA as leverage to dispossess Detroit of their marquee draw. Cooke then made him the league’s highest paid player with a five-year, $1.5-million contract.
It was a philosophy that didn’t work so well in other management moves, most disastrously the draft: From 1969 to 1978, the Kings had just one pick in the first round, forward Tim Young, who was traded to Minnesota before he ever played for L.A. “Because we traded all those picks, we didn’t have any depth on the roster,” Taylor’s former linemate Charlie Simmer says.
Unfortunately for Cooke, unforeseen financial and personal issues didn’t allow him to stick around to see his vision play out. His wife was awarded more than $40 million in a divorce settlement that had him selling off his playthings, the Kings among them. But when Cooke sold the franchise to Dr. Jerry Buss, he handed the team over to a kindred spirit. If Buss wasn’t star-driven before, his other team, the NBA’s Lakers, put him in the mindset—he inherited Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the team’s first draft pick during his tenure was Magic Johnson.
Buss’s Kings featured arguably hockey’s hottest draw: the Triple Crown Line—Dionne, Taylor and Simmer. The line set scoring records, with all three topping 100 points in the 1980–81 season. Late in that campaign, however, Simmer suffered a broken leg, and he never regained his 50-goal form. Just as Cooke had hoped to land Hull, Buss had his eyes on the biggest prize in the game: Wayne Gretzky. Bruce McNall may get the credit, but it was Buss who greased the Oilers’ wheels about Gretzky. “We heard rumbles about it,” says Taylor. “I didn’t think it could ever happen.”
The Kings’ run to the Stanley Cup final in 1993 is widely regarded as the franchise’s high-water mark, but Taylor thought the teams the previous two years were stronger.
Nick Beverley, the GM of the ’93 Kings, concurs. “Everything just fell into place for us that year,” he says. “I traded for Jimmy Carson because we needed a skilled centre—Wayne had a back injury that year and it looked like he wasn’t going to play. We didn’t even know if he’d play again. Then he goes out and gets 40 points in the playoffs. [To get Carson] I traded a great defenceman, Paul Coffey, who needed a lot of ice time, so that I could get three young guys—Rob Blake, Alexei Zhitnik and Darryl Sydor—in there, and they really took off.”
But just as fast as everything came together, it all fell apart the next year, leading to two decades in the wilderness. Veterans aged ungracefully and rapidly. The team missed the playoffs. McNall’s fortune proved to be a chimera, one that would land him in jail before the decade was out. New owners were undercapitalized. And in his little corner of this perfect storm, Taylor retired after the 1993–94 season.
The Kings’ financial outlook brightened when billionaire industrialist Philip Anschutz bought them for $113 million in October 1995, but a disenchanted Gretzky was traded to St. Louis in February 1996. The following year, Taylor was installed as GM. His term was a success on some counts (three consecutive 90-point seasons starting in 1999–2000) but less so on others (just one trip out of the first round of the playoffs).
One of Taylor’s successes was the draft, the original hole in Cooke’s plans for the franchise. In contrast to the Kings’ draft giveaways in the ’70s, Taylor only once traded away a first-rounder. Not every one of them was a hit like Brown or Kopitar, and a couple never made it into an NHL lineup, but the Kings were taking their cuts.
Taylor moved from the GM’s post to a player development role in 2006 when Anschutz brought in Lombardi, the former GM in San Jose. Though the team hadn’t made the playoffs since ’02, Lombardi did have more pieces to play with than the record suggested. In the salary-cap era, the dynamics of the game are different than Cooke throwing money at Dionne, or McNall opening his large, if dubious, cheque book. But it took Anschutz’s largesse, previously only a theoretical character trait, to jump-start the franchise. Rather than paying for stars (and overpaying former stars), the Kings invested largely and wisely, dedicating money to players still on upward trajectories. “The Kings were taking on commitments of more than $100 million over the course of Richards’s and Carter’s contracts,” Taylor says. “Then there’s the contract they signed Doughty to last fall. Before making the trades with Philadelphia and Columbus, a GM would have to talk to ownership. That’s negotiating you’d have to do before you can start talking trade. This is the first time L.A. spent to the cap. They outspent Detroit this season.”
The fact is, Lombardi successfully solicited support from ownership that Dave Taylor didn’t enjoy during his tenure. The inescapable irony: Taylor’s model for the team, one that Lombardi built on, was a sharp contrast to those earlier incarnations of the Kings. There’s no Triple Crown Line, no No. 99. It’s a team with a lot of players who, if you use your imagination, play the game a lot like the former GM whose number hangs in the rafters.
This article originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine.