For 19 Seasons, The Kings Counted on Kopitar. Now Comes the Final One.

From Jesenice to Los Angeles, Kopitar built a career on steadiness. This fall marks the beginning of his last ride.

(Picutred: Kopitar salutes)

By Anthony Pellegrino @Pellegrinoap50 TheFrozenFocus.com NHL Correspondent

In 2005, a 17-year-old from Jesenice, Slovenia, crossed the draft stage and into a league that had never really heard of him. Anže Kopitar was just seventeen, already making history as the first Slovenian ever to reach the NHL.

Back home, the game was small. One rink in a steel town. A boy coached by his father, Matjaž, who had carried the sport as far as it could go in a country better known for skiing.

Few imagined his name would be called 11th overall. Few imagined Los Angeles would be the one to call at all.

And yet, it happened.

The Kings found a center they didn’t know they had been waiting for.

Los Angeles has always asked for spectacle. Kopitar has given them something quieter. Always ready and reliable. He made the game smaller for opponents, simpler for his teammates. That steadiness has endured. Through the churn of long seasons, he has been the one piece that never moved.

He would arrive the following fall, eighteen years old, still trying to find his place in a city vastly more known for Hollywood than hockey.

(Pictured: Kopitar skates in 2006)

His first game changed that. Two goals against Anaheim. A poise that didn’t match his age. The quiet certainty that he belonged. By the end of his rookie year, he had 61 points, fourth among all first-year players, and a franchise certain it had found its center.

The winning came slowly, then all at once.

By the spring of 2012, the Kings had found their edge, and Kopitar was at the center of it. He wasn’t loud about it. He never was. He just kept showing up in the right places, against the right players, and turning the ice in Los Angeles’s favor. In Newark, in Game 1, he slipped free in overtime and pulled the puck around Martin Brodeur. One move, one finish, and the Kings had the opening they needed.

By June, they had their first Stanley Cup. Kopitar had 20 points that spring, the quiet constant on a team that had finally found its voice. Two years later, the path was harder. San Jose. Anaheim. Chicago. Three straight Game 7s on the road, and every time Kopitar was steady, giving his teammates the calm they needed.

By the time the Rangers fell in the Final, he had led all scorers again, 26 points this time, and a second Cup was paraded down Figueroa.

Los Angeles had wanted spectacle. What it got were banners built on the kind of plays that rarely made the highlight reels. Faceoffs won, sticks in lanes, long shifts where the ice tilted back in the Kings’ direction because of one man in the middle.

(Picutred: Kopitar walks down tunnel)

By 2016, the Kopitar Era reached new heights. Dustin Brown had been the first to raise the Cup in Los Angeles, the captain who led them through the breakthrough years of 2012 and 2014. But as the team evolved, so did its voice.

Kopitar had already become the anchor, the player carrying the hardest minutes, the one teammates leaned on in the quiet moments. The organization formalized what had long felt true.

The captaincy passed to him. It wasn’t about Brown stepping aside. He would play six more seasons, retiring in 2022 with his number raised and a statue waiting outside the arena. His legacy was secure.

For Kopitar, wearing the letter didn’t change who he was. He stayed the same: steady, deliberate, leading more with presence than with words. Two Selke trophies would follow, the reward for years of quiet domination.

The milestones came too.

A thousand games, a thousand points. He crossed them the way he had played all along: without spectacle, one after another.

(Picutred: Kopitar hoists Stanley Cup)

Through it all, in the past nineteen seasons, Kopitar remained. Coaches cycled through. Rosters turned over. The Kings tore down, rebuilt, and tried again. He stayed in the middle, the constant through nearly two decades of change. More than 1,300 games. More than 1,200 points.

This September doesn’t feel like the others. Training camp has always been routine, the start of another calendar to fill with minutes and miles. But now, everyone knows there will not be another.

The months ahead will be filled with lasts. A last opener. A last trip through the Canadian prairies. A last night in Anaheim, where it all began. Nineteen years in, Kopitar’s totals are already permanent.

More than 1,300 games, more than 1,200 points, two Stanley Cups, two Selke trophies. The numbers will stand. What remains is how it will feel to see them close.

“After lots and lots of thinking, I’ve decided that this year’s gonna be my last year playing in the NHL,” Kopitar said.

For Los Angeles, the farewell will be less about the final box score than the memory of all the years in between the teenager from Slovenia who made the game smaller, steadier, and simpler.

At the core, Kopitar’s truest legacy may be the simplest: he gave the Kings a center they could trust, and he never gave them a reason to let go.