Doughty to sign 8 year deal to stay with the Kings

[yave1964]

The Kings locked up their superstar defenseman Drew Doughty in a deal that cannot be announced until Sunday, signing Drew Doughty to a deal that is expected to be eight years in the neighborhood of eleven million bucks a year.

 

  I am of two minds when it comes to this deal, on the one hand, Doughty is truly one of the premier two way defenders in the game providing Norris caliber defense and he scored 60 points last season and has not missed a single game in the past four seasons. He is mid prime, 28 at the start of the season and was due to be a free agent at the end of the next season. He was gonna get PAID. 

 

 On the other hand, he will be 38 at the end of the contract and in the game which is now owned by younger and faster players very few players survive until that point. The odds are that the last several years of the deal at the least will be an albatross for the Kings.

 

  The thing is though the core of Kopitar, Quick, doughty, Brown, Carter and now Kovalchuk has a three year window before any chance of returning to the Iron Throne is over,  losing Doughty would have put an end to any idea that they are anything but pretenders for the foreseeable future.

 

  So yeah, the more I look at it I get it, between Kovie and Doughty and the hopes that kids such as Kempe and Toffoli ect… step up their game and Martinez and Muzzin on defense I can see how the Kings had to do this deal to extend their window. The West is down right now, very wide open to any of a half dozen teams and this keeps them in the mix for the immediate future. Live for the day.

 

 Doughty played it right, played it loud whenever asked he stated baldly that he was gonna get paid and kept lumping himself in with Karlsson which was a smart thing to do money wise. Good move for the team, great move for the player.