Brown’s path a model for Doughty
By Jon Rosen — LA Kings Insider
With stipulations of the new collective bargaining agreement stating that players who have graduated from an entry level contract are now able to receive their own hotel room on the road, the four-year roommate partnership of Dustin Brown and Drew Doughty has ended.
There are both positives and negatives of this development.
“Just sitting around talking with him, you miss that,” Brown said. “The flipside of that is I don’t have to wake him up early.”
So did Brown serve as Doughty’s personal alarm clock?
“He sleeps more than I do, that’s for sure,” Brown said.
It’s the latest anecdote in the relationship between a tight knit pair of players who have shared a similar path to the National Hockey League.
Both players have birthdays beyond the NHL Draft cut-off date (September 15) and were selected one year past their age classes. Both were first round draft selections who made their NHL debuts with the Kings shortly before their 19th birthdays. Both enjoyed prolific junior careers with the Ontario Hockey League’s Guelph Storm and have represented their countries in the Winter Olympics.
When Doughty made his first appearance in Los Angeles in the summer of 2008, Brown was already well aware of the then-18 year old’s background.
“They had the summer rookie camp and I was here training, so I introduced myself to him,” Brown said of the pair’s first encounter. “I knew a bit of his background. We played with the same junior team. His billet family – they weren’t my billet family, but I was pretty close with them – and so I had a pretty good idea of what type of kid he was.”
The “type of kid” Doughty was drifted towards the other end of the spectrum from Brown. When Brown was playing in the NHL as a teenager, he was shy and reserved – a pair of words that aren’t often used in reference to the naturally gregarious Doughty, or “Dewey” as his teammates endearingly call him.
Ask Brown a question about his former road roommate, and a smirk grows slowly on the forward’s face. There are often chirps between the two; before last season’s Tip-A-King team charity event, Brown even joked about trying to persuade Doughty to lug around an Xbox for the duration of a road trip, noting “he might actually fall for it.”
But when it comes to heart-to-heart discussions between the two players who won a Stanley Cup in their 20s, Brown has long been a steadying voice of stability for his younger teammate’s professional transition.
“I’m the type of guy who doesn’t get dealing with coaches being all over me, or the media being all over me, or things like that, and that’s something since I was young he’s helped me with and told me not to worry about,” Doughty said. “When I’m struggling with getting points, or whatever it may be, I get frustrated, and he’s always been the first one to tell me ‘You’re playing well. Don’t worry about those things. They’ll come.’
“He’s always helped me with those off-ice issues.”
