That’s just who Kopitar has been.
He is a guy who has gone about his career in the NHL the right way. He’s never really chased individual accolades at the expense of team success. That fact that he’s amassed 1,300 career points, playing on a team like the Kings, who have never chased offense while he’s been here, is even more amazing. The matchups he’s logged over the years, the hard minutes on the penalty kill, make it that much more impressive.
It’s for those reasons that Kopitar has often flown under the radar on a national scale. I mean, the 70-point center playing Selke-caliber defense is never going to flash all that often on highlight reels, especially when he wins the opening faceoff at 10:30 PM Eastern on most nights. But the level he’s brought in Los Angeles, over the years, has rarely been matched around the league in his time.
His teammates in Los Angeles are happy that his final season, along with milestones like this, are thrusting what he’s accomplished into the spotlight.
“He’s been a guy that is okay staying out of the limelight his entire career, but it means a lot that people are really taking the time to appreciate him as much as we’ve appreciated him his entire career, as long as I’ve been here and I know before that too,” defenseman Brandt Clarke added. “It’s obviously really special, it’s a great milestone for him, he’s just going to play it as another game, because that’s just the kind of person he is, but the fact that he’s kind of closing on all these records and people are actually appreciating him the way he deserves, we like to see that, because that’s what he deserves.”
It is what Kopitar deserves.
And it’s not just for the player he is, but the person that his teammates have seen over the years as well.
The kind of guy you want welcoming younger players into your organization. The kind of person who takes care of those around him, sometimes at the expense of himself. That’s the kind of guy you want around, for as long as Kopitar has been.
“Obviously he’s an unbelievable player, but he almost a better person,” defenseman Jacob Moverare said. “He’s just such a good person to lean on, with everything. Even things like he lent me his golf clubs when I needed them. It’s stuff like that, that maybe people don’t care about, but he’s just such an unbelievable person. He’s helped me anything he can.”
When Kopitar hits the ice tomorrow, he’ll join an extremely exclusive group of players and likely people as well.
Certainly hopeful it’s not the last celebration of a Kopitar milestone this season, but rather the first of several to come.
The Kings will honor Kopitar in April 2 for his collective legacy, as opposed to a ceremony for each individual mark. That’s of his choosing, considering the importance of each game here and, frankly, the fact that we’d potentially have three or four pre-game ceremonies if not for merging them together. Not that it would bother his teammates, who would likely celebrate him gladly. But his preference was to have one night to take it all in.
One night, for a player who has proven that the math of how rare he is would be far to difficult to calculate. Easier to just call him 1 of 1. Fitting, for number 11 in Los Angeles.