The Kings’ practice rink in El Segundo is empty save for two men circling each other near the blue line, ready to fight. One, roughly the size and shape of a small vending machine, is in street clothes while the other towers over him in skates and a white-and-black hockey sweater.
If they come to blows it will be a mismatch, especially since the taller guy is wearing a helmet and carrying a stick. But teaching players to defend themselves in situations like this is kind of the point.
The heavily muscled man in street clothes is Jeremy Clark, a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu who the players all call the fight coach. And the first rule of fight coach is don’t talk about the fight coach. At least not in those terms.
“He’s our confidence coach,” Glen Murray, the director of player development for the playoff-bound Kings, says of the man who teaches the team to fight.
“We prefer to call him our toughness coach,” a team spokesperson said.
As for what Clark prefers to call himself, that’s not known because the second rule of fight coach is no one is allowed to talk to the fight coach. But whatever you call him, Clark, the owner of a crossfit and combat-training gym in Minnesota, is a key part of a player-development program that has left no idea unexplored if it has a chance to make the Kings better.
So in addition to a fight…er, confidence coach, the team has four strength and conditioning coaches, a sports dietitian, a psychologist, a skating coach, a video coordinator and a director of goaltending. There are specialists who work on shooting and others who work on face-offs. Add it all up and the Kings have more player-development people, about two dozen in all, than they have players. And that doesn’t count the four coaches the team puts behind the bench each game.
It’s an expensive commitment, one few other teams in the NHL have tried to match. But with the line separating the top teams from the also-rans getting thinner and thinner, it’s an investment that helped the Kings match single-season franchise records for wins (48) and points (105) this year while claiming the home-ice advantage for the first round of the playoffs. They’ll open the postseason Monday at Crypto.com Arena against the Edmonton Oilers, the team that eliminated them in the first round each of the last three seasons.
“This is a necessary expense,” Murray said. “Ultimately the most important people in the organization are the players and we have to prepare them the best we can with the tools we have. We’re going to make sure you have the best of everything to be able to perform.”
The process of building out that philosophy began under former general manager Dean Lombardi, who introduced some sports science pieces and other technologies while leading the team to two Stanley Cups.
“He always talked about gaining that extra 3%. Trying to make the team better,” said Bill Ranford, the director of goaltending for the Kings, a job Ranford estimates just a half-dozen NHL teams have. “Teams are always looking for that edge.”
But chasing that edge became a priority under Rob Blake, who replaced Lombardi prior to the 2017-18 season. Among his first moves was promoting Murray.
“Rob’s fairly calculated. He’s patient, methodical. But when there’s clear evidence that we need to make changes to add or to grow, he’s never hesitated,” Matt Price, the Kings’ director of strength and performance science, said of Blake, who has taken heat from fans over his roster decisions but has proven a visionary with many of the things he’s pushed off the ice.
Price has seen his department triple in size under Blake, adding a full-time dietitian, two additional strength coaches, and a dietitian and strength coach for the team’s AHL affiliate in Ontario.
”We have player-tracking data that gets collected every day that needs to be analyzed and processed and presented. There’s a mountain of information that gets collected every day,” Price said. “So it’s just sort of the evolution of the NHL, the Kings sort of being early adopters of this. We’ve really been at the tip of the spear on a lot of these things.”
Murray estimates the overall investment in strength and nutrition alone at “well over $1 million” a season, a bargain considering what that investment has bought.
“The sort of feeling is, maybe the work we do for the course of 82 games gets us three points,” said Price, who is in his 11th season with the Kings. “It could be how we handle players on the second night of a back-to-back and we got that game to overtime and we got the point. It could be a decision that’s made with the coaching staff how to manage load.”
Or it could be what Price and the team’s medical staff did to get future Hall of Fame defenseman Drew Doughty back from a broken ankle in just four months.
“Across a long season there’s so much actionable data that somewhere in there, we feel we’ve banked a few points,” Price said.
Kari Oliver, who joined the team as its sports dietitian midway through the 2020-21 season, said few teams in the NHL offer the kind of nutrition support the Kings do. Oliver, who also manages the players’ dietary supplements and lab work, has a culinary staff of more than a half-dozen, including two sous chefs at the team’s El Segundo practice facility, where players are served two individually tailored meals and a recovery shake every day the team is there.
“Nutrition is massive nowadays,” Murray said. “Some kids have no clue what they’re supposed to eat and how much and what gives them more energy. I’m surprised not every team has it. We’re lucky.”
To make sure the players don’t stray from their diets, Oliver plans and oversees every meal players receive from the team, including the food served on the team’s charter flights.
“I feel like I’m planning a wedding every single time that we go on a road trip,” she said. “Even if we go out to a restaurant as a team — we do that often in the playoffs — I’ll go ahead to the restaurant and make sure everything’s set up exactly how we want it. I work with every hotel we stay at and send them menus.”
She said she gains an appreciation for just how different the team’s support program is every time a new player arrives.
“They tell us their experience [else]where,” said Oliver, who has taken players on supermarket visits and given them cooking demonstrations as part of their nutrition education. “When they get here I’ll sit down with them and kind of just rapid fire try to figure out a profile of them from a nutrition standpoint.”
One of this season’s converts is goaltender Darcy Kuemper, who played half a season with the Kings shortly after Blake took over, then was traded back to the team last summer. The difference between then and now, he said, was dramatic and he credits Oliver, Price, Ranford and the rest of the sprawling support staff with helping him to the best season of his career.
“You see the different people they have in place, whether it’s nutrition, strength. From an organizational standpoint, they want to give us all the tools so that we have everything we need to [be] the best version of yourself,” said Kuemper, whose goals-against average of 2.02 was second-best among regular goalkeepers this season. “So there’s no excuses but to go out and perform.”
One reason the Kings’ approach succeeds is the support staff, like the team on the ice, know their roles and they stay in their lanes. But they also complement one another and quietly share the credit for the team’s success.
“We want to do our job but we don’t make a lot of fanfare out of what we do,” Oliver said. “We just want to make sure that we’re giving them really good resources and kind of staying behind the scenes.”
“We’re here to maximize potential. And, for the most part, players see this as a significant help,” Price added. “They see this as something that can really boost their performance. They all know better performance equals bigger contracts. Better performance means more wins.”
Credit Blake for finding a way to squeeze out those extra wins.
“The difference between doing nothing and doing something,” Price added “is a pretty big gap.”