Meh. Winning will breed hate amongst our competitors. It is a natural progression. Think of how we felt about Detroit or Edmonton in the past. They are going to zoom in on anything they can and try to amplify it and spread the hate, that's the only reaction they have.
Players will have their natural progression criticized and mocked to bring them down to size so they can compare them with their own players. Just look at what happened to Ovechkin. At the start of the year, people were arguing that he wasn't even a top 10 player, and some even said that he was not even a top 20 player. It's always about what have they done for them in the last two weeks, careers be damned. I'd just ignore it.
The greatest joy, nowadays as a Kings fan, is to ignore the bickering of threads that like to rank top defensemen and call Doughty this or that. Because we no longer care about silly incremental comparisons amongst our individual players. It's about the team now, we are winning, we have won, and we expect to win. To hell with wannabe rankings and silly bickerings, we don't have to bother with such pettiness anymore.
Doughty himself has learned this over the past couple years, especially last year. It's not so much about being the best individual player you can be and going for individual accolades, it is about doing whatever it takes, points be damned, to get that win at the end of the day. It's about the team, not the individual, and that right there is the true beauty of what Dean Lombardi has truly accomplished here in LA.
Doughty knows now, at such a young age, what it means to be a LA King, what it means to fight for the man sitting next to you on that bench, in that locker-room, above yourself, and that attitude will be present within this organization for the next decade.
Or the Ucks go point-less and we go 2-0-1, creating a tie at 62-points (I edited my previous post. Just makes the Detroit, Oilers, and Avalanche losses hurt even more.
