Exclusive: Lombardi and Others Reflect on Trevor Lewis Playing 1,000 NHL Games

Mayor's Manor

Over the weekend, Trevor Lewis played in his 1,000th NHL game. It came more than 15 years after he made his debut on Dec. 19, 2009 at Buffalo. Lewis played just over nine minutes vs. the Sabres without recording a point. Less than 24 hours later, he scored his first NHL goal in Detroit.

Yet the story of how his NHL career all came together really began back on June 24, 2006. That’s when Dean Lombardi, serving as LA’s General Manager at the time, orchestrated a trade with Minnesota to acquire Patrick O’Sullivan and the 17th pick in that year’s Draft for Pavol Demitra. It was the selection LA eventually used to take Trevor Lewis out of the USHL (and on his way to the OHL; which is a whole other story, because growing up in Utah should have placed him in the WHL).

“I think of just a younger version of what you see as a player now,” said Mike Stothers, when we asked what he thinks of when recalling having Lewis play for him back then in Owen Sound. “Not the thousand game player or an aging player, but just a guy that was detailed and driven. He was a coach’s dream, as far as you’d only have to tell him something once. He never took shortcuts; he did everything the right way.”

During their only season together, leading into the Draft that year, Lewis was third on the team in goals scored.

“He had 29 goals,” Stothers continued. “Lewis had a nose for the net. He had some good hockey sense to know where to be. He hasn’t put up great offensive numbers in the NHL, but I think if you were to ask his teammate or any of the coaches that have had him, they’d all wish they had 20 more guys just like him. He’s just an awesome person, a great teammate, and he’ll do anything to win. At the same time, man, I didn’t even realize, like a thousand games? If you had to see a kid coming out of junior and playing pro, you might be hard pressed to think he was going to play 1,000 games because that’s a lot. It’s a testimony to how he looks after himself. He’s always kept himself in great shape, he’s the ultimate pro. Even in junior, he was not a guy we had to babysit. He was a self-motivator, self -starter and all you had to do is basically give him a little bit of a game plan on what we were doing, or what we were expecting to do against that particular opponent, and he did it right down to the last detail.”

Lombardi agreed with those sentiments back then and still has all the time in the world to praise Lewis when discussing his former players recent career milestone.

“He’s an ideal role model for a lot of reasons,” Lombardi proudly proclaimed. “The problem a lot of times is, when you take a kid in the first round, you’re generally not going to expend a first-round pick on a role player. When you’re in the first round — particularly the first half — very seldom will you see a GM or scouting staff say, ‘OK, let’s take this guy. He’s gonna be a hell of a third- or fourth-line player.’ It’s really not the ideal way to spend your capital. That philosophy can change when you move into your second, third, and particularly your middle rounds.”

While it’s easy to point to somebody like Mike Futa as having inside knowledge from his days as Owen Sound GM, Lombardi indicated it’s more nuanced than just that simple notion.

“A lot of first rounders think they have to justify their selection,” Lombardi explained. “A lot of these kids, after they graduate to the pros, they aren’t able to take a self-appraisal and say, ‘This is where I’m at. I have to add to my game and change my game and I’m not gonna be a scorer.’ A lot of kids never make it because they can’t adapt to what their real abilities are for being an NHL player. You see that with a lot of kids, particularly nowadays when there’s so much hype with being a first rounder. These kids think, ‘I’m a first rounder, I’m going to put up 80 points.’ That’s just not the case. Most of them mentally have a hard time making that adjustment. With [Lewis], I remember watching him after we drafted him, there really wasn’t that type of game that translated into a top-6 player.”

At that point, Lewis could have easily been another in the long list of first round washouts around the league, a career minor league player at best. That simply wasn’t in the cards, though.

“When we got him in our development program, and this is where those guys are so important,” explained Lombardi. “They’re the most underrated people in any organization. And what did he do? He adapted. If you don’t adapt, you go extinct. As he went through the development program and spent time with the coaches and things, he realized, ‘If I’m going to be an NHL player, I have to play the whole rink. I have to be dependable. I have to be able to kill penalties. I have to be counted on as one of those guys in the last minute of the game, where the coach completely trusts me.

“Now, to you and I, or to the outside observer, that might make a whole lot of sense. No, it’s not the way so many of these athletes think. This kid was probably one of our best students, development wise. He was our best student, mentally and physically. He was a sponge, an absolute sponge, taking in what he had to do to fulfill a role on a good team. Then, physically, he went and worked on it. He did everything, whether it’s work on faceoffs, puck protection, etc. He had no idea how to protect the puck when he was in junior hockey. He became one of our best with that puck along the boards. He’d battle that thing, hold guys off, getting pucks out along the boards. All of these things, he was immune to. As a junior player taken in the first round, a lot of these kids don’t want to do it, they don’t have to.”

Mark Morris, who coached the Kings AHL affiliate in Manchester at the time, agrees with much of Lombardi’s premise.

“He was just a puppy when he came to us,” Morris told Mayor’s Manor with a hearty laugh. “I didn’t know much about him, but he had all kinds of good accolades and stuff. But, at the start, I think things were a little bit slower than he had hoped. It took him a while to earn his spot with the Monarchs, but man, he showed everybody how reliable he was, sure-handed, won important faceoffs, and got pucks out of the zone. He’d block shots too. Those guys are a coach’s dream. The scoring wasn’t his strength. His biggest strength was just the fact that he was so reliable and that he could get pucks to other people. I think that as he got stronger and more confident, he did it through just being a really accountable, reliable player for us. He would play center or he could play wing, but he really embraced the opportunities that he got once he earned his spot. It’s really heartwarming to see a guy like him go on to have so much success. It wasn’t like he was given the keys to the car; he’s had to earn it.”

As Lewis prepared for his 1,000th NHL game, Morris shared an early comparable he made to another one of his former players — and a guy who later played 1,009 NHL games in his own right, as well as served as Calgary’s Assistant GM when the Flames signed Lewis a few years ago.

“Lewis kind of reminded me of Craig Conroy, who I had in college” Morris revealed. “When guys are really coachable and they are willing to do what’s needed for a team, I think it just says so much about the chemistry that is built — not only for a season, but for an organization to know that they have those reliable players that have embraced a role and play such a big part in shutting other teams down. He was a pretty quiet guy when we got him too, not a real vocal type. But, watching him as a veteran player with LA and Calgary, you can tell Trevor really knows what he’s doing. He’s pointing where guys should go off a draw and so on. Even knowing what a consistent reliable, player he grew to be, to think that he’s played a thousand games in the NHL, that never even crossed my mind back then.”

Of his 1,000 NHL games, 782 have come in Los Angeles. He’ll likely finish his career sitting seventh on the list of most games played in a Kings uniform. Only names like Kopitar, Brown, Doughty, Taylor, Robitaille, and Dionne have suited up more times for the franchise.

With a pair of Stanley Cup rings to show for the team he helped build, Lombardi is still thankful for those players he had in Los Angeles. So much so, that he shared several funny stories about getting together with most of those guys at the two most recent reunions — where one of his highlights was seeing the often more-serious Lewis bring back some of his classic quick wit and zingers.

“Lewie can be quiet, but he’s cagey,” Lombardi quipped. “He has these funny little one-liners about him; he cracks me up. He gave it to me good at the reunions several times.”

To no surprise, it wasn’t long before Lombardi went back to poetically waxing on — as few in the entire game of hockey have ever been able to do — about one of his former players.

“If you look at the minutia of the game, all the little things, [Lewis] is a superstar,” Lombardi said with enough confidence to silence any critic who may potentially want to argue with him. “I used to tell my players this all the time. We have this label of ‘superstar’ or ‘star.’ The object is to be a star within your role. You’re not going to win a championship unless every guy accepts a role and becomes a star in that role. The way sports is now, there’s all this glorification of the top players, which is great. But, if you’re going to win championships, you have to have stars in their roles. This guy was a superstar in his role, no doubt about it.”

That’s a far cry from the earlier days, though.

“He sucked when we got him,” Lombardi said, speaking in full character, before driving his point home. “Trevor was a sponge, though. [In school], he’d be that guy who was a teacher’s pet because he did everything he was supposed to do, in spades.”

[Bonus audio from Lombardi below]

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