All photos courtesy of Getty Images
Drew Doughty hadn’t been sleeping much.
Too much uncertainty.
Pre-game naps? Not a chance.
At least not until he got the call that he had been hoping he’d still get since the moment he fractured his ankle during the Los Angeles Kings’ first pre-season game in late September.
In reality, it’s the call he and so many NHL players had been waiting to get since the last time they engaged in best-on-best competition almost a decade ago.
Hours before the final rosters for the 4 Nations Face-Off had to be registered by Canada, the United States, Finland and Sweden, Doughty was feeling especially nervous and unsettled as he tried to go down for a pre-game nap.
“It was like 1:30 in the afternoon, two o'clock. I usually nap from, like, one ‘til three. And I had a missed call from a Tampa number. Didn't answer it. I was like, darn, that could have been Coop,” Doughty recalled as he sat in the Canadian locker room after the team’s first skate in Montreal.
“Coop” is, of course, Canada’s head coach, Jon Cooper.
“And then he texted me and said, ‘It's Coop. Call me when you can.’ Called him right away,” Doughty said.
As it turned out, Doughty was the only player that Cooper called personally to tell them they’d been selected to the Canadian squad. That duty fell to the management team until the Doughty call.
It was emotional for both men.
“That was somebody that you would never have known that he's the age he is and the experience he's had with Team Canada,” Cooper said of the blueliner’s reaction.
“He accepted it like he won the lottery. And you want that. You still want that passion and not sitting there saying, I've been there, done that. And he was definitely not like that,” Cooper said.
“We talked about potential roles and where he fits in in the group and basically, he was like, ‘You don't need to do that. You just tell me where and when and if it's never, then so be it.’ But he was great,” Cooper added.
The veteran defenceman’s parents were visiting in Los Angeles from their home in London, Ontario.
“So, I opened my door, yelled downstairs, ‘Hey, I [blanking] made it. And so, it was a bit of excitement,” Doughty said. “And then, honestly, that was the first time I got a good nap. Because I've had this in the back of my mind for a long time.”
You don’t think of a player like Drew Doughty, a Norris Trophy winner, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and two-time Stanley Cup champion as someone who feels anxiety or self-doubt.
And that goes a long way in explaining just what this 4 Nations Face-Off tournament means to the best players in the world. And it goes a long way in describing just what kind of person Doughty is to open up about his emotions surrounding his selection.
From the moment Doughty, 35, went down awkwardly in that preseason game in Las Vegas, getting healthy in time to join Canada has never been far from his mind.
Kings general manager, Rob Blake, recalled coming into the training room in Vegas immediately after the injury and Doughty was already wanting to know about recovery time, implying if he would be ready for 4 Nations.
“He was thinking about Canada, I could tell right away,” Blake said.
Great players, players who get to the level that Doughty has achieved, are never satisfied.
And so it is with Doughty.
“They just want to be part of the next big thing,” Blake said.
Blake should know. He’s in the Hockey Hall of Fame, competed in three Olympic Games and a World Cup of Hockey.
“It fueled him coming back,” Blake said. “It got pretty tense at the end.”
When Doughty finally got into action with just a handful of games left before the 4 Nations break, he would head into the coaches’ office after each contest to get their assessment of his level of play.
What he really wanted to know was whether they thought he had played well enough to make the team.
Blake and Canada general manager, Don Sweeney, spoke pretty much every other day leading up to the roster cut-off.
Cooper called Kings assistant coach D.J. Smith, who handles the Kings’ blueline corps. So, too, did Cooper’s assistant on Canada, Pete DeBoer, who oversees Canada’s defence.
No one is asking Doughty to be who he isn’t at this stage of his career.
When he played for a dominant Team Canada at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Doughty was one of the top defenders in the game. A few months later, he would win his second Stanley Cup in three seasons. Two years after that he would win a Norris Trophy as the top defender in the game.
“I think now his skill set is as much or more leadership, mentorship, passion, experience,” DeBoer said. “It’s a different generation of player. But what he does, you can't find. He's a throwback type player and he's a throwback type leader, which I think everybody's looking for.”
DeBoer seemed as excited as Doughty that he had joined the group.
“He's willing to drop everything. Everything,” to be part of this team, DeBoer said. “There's not many guys with that short a runway that you would consider bringing. That shows you how much we value what he brings to the table.”
Blake understands the dynamics, the desire to be part of the mix, even if Doughty is closer to the end than the beginning when he first burst onto the hockey scene with Team Canada at the 2010 Winter Olympics having just turned 20.
“That’s him now paying this back all these years later,” Blake said. “He was so excited. Just like a little kid.”
Scott Niedermayer was the captain of that 2010 Canadian Olympic team.
He figures it was the first time he met Doughty.
But what became obvious right away was the passion with which Doughty played the game, even as a boy just out of his teens playing against the best in the world.
Now the circle of hockey has brought Doughty to near completion.
“It’s amazing how quickly it seems these things change,” Niedermayer noted.
He was the veteran near the end of his career in 2010 and now Doughty has fought off a serious injury to join the Canadian roster as an elder statesman.
“To be able to get into this tournament, he's probably so excited. I imagine he's probably feeling just like he almost did when he was there in 2010. That would be my guess, just with his personality, his enthusiasm, the way he plays the game. So, it's kind of neat that he gets that chance.”
“For a guy like that, you get a couple opportunities early in his career and then, for multiple reasons there hasn't been that opportunity again. He obviously knows he's not the youngest guy anymore and you don't play forever. And I'm sure that just puts it in such a different perspective than the first one,” Niedermayer added.
“And I know that was sort of true for me, not only in these tournaments, but just in your career as a player. The perspective definitely changes and you maybe in some ways appreciate it more. You know, you just recognize that both of these opportunities [at the NHL level and internationally] are not going to last forever. So you really soak it in and you see it and feel it in a different way.”
Niedermayer is right. Perspective is such a big part of why Doughty hasn’t been seen without a smile since the players arrived in frosty Montreal.
The Kings haven’t won a playoff round since their 2014 Stanley Cup run, and while Doughty was part of Canada’s winning effort at the 2016 World Cup of Hockey, victories have been harder to come by as the years have passed.
This is a chance to taste that again and it’s a chance to prove to people that he’s still got it. It’s a chance to prove it to him as well.
“I mean, I haven't accomplished a lot in the last, I don't know how many years. I haven't won a playoff round since we won the Cup. Which is not something I'm about. I'm a competitor. I want to be playing in big games. I want to be playing in Stanley Cup finals,” Doughty said.
“So, I was nervous when I came back from my injury, that's for sure. And that's the first time I've been nervous since probably 2010 to be honest,” Doughty said. “Now that we're rolling here, the nerves have left and I’ll be fine.”
And if he plays with a little chip on his shoulder, well, is that such a bad thing?
He certainly didn’t look out of place in Canada’s tournament opener against Sweden in a classic 4-3 overtime win for Canada. Doughty was solid, playing 18:54 as Canada had to play with five defencemen after Shea Theodore was injured. It’s not what he’s used to in Los Angeles, when he returned to the lineup and played 31:09 in his final game before the break.
After the game against Sweden, Doughty called it the fastest game in which he’d ever skated.
“I think it's just good for me to be here to resurrect my career a little bit. I think a lot of people have me written off with my game, but I'm here to show them that they're wrong here,” Doughty said.
“I'm not maybe the same player I was in 2016 or something, but I still got it,” he added.
Doughty was sitting next to former Norris Trophy winner and Stanley Cup champion Cale Makar in the Canadian locker room after the team’s first skate.
Makar’s jersey bears No.8.
That is, of course, the number Doughty has worn since he was in his early teens.
In this moment, though, Doughty’s jersey sports No. 89.
He shrugs his shoulders. It has an eight in it. And who better to wear “his” number than Makar?
“He’s the best I’ve ever seen,” Doughty said.
With Theodore out of action Doughty often found himself skating alongside Makar against Sweden and it was hard not to see it as a kind of intersection of generations of greatness. A moment to be acknowledged, even cherished.
No doubt these are forever memories for Doughty.
