Kings Lock up Center Anze Kopitar With 8-Year, $80M Contract

LOS ANGELES Anze Kopitar agreed to an eight-year, $80 million contract extension with the Kings on Saturday, keeping Los Angeles’ franchise center with the club through the 2023-24 season.

The native of Jesenice, Slovenia, will earn $14 million next season, $13 million in 2017-18, $12 million in 2018-19, $11 million in 2019-20, $8 million in 2020-21 and 2021-22, and $7 million in each of the final two-years of his contract. He has 230 goals and 415 assists in 725 games with the Kings, who drafted him with the 11th overall pick in 2005.

Anze Kopitar has helped lead the Kings to two Stanley Cups.

“I’ve been a part of this organization, I guess when we went through pretty big struggles and not very fun years when we played”.

Center Mika Zibanejad and right winger Bobby Ryan each had a goal and an assist as the Senators defeated the Kings 5-3 on Saturday.

Kopitar had been on the verge of signing the deal for several days, but it has hung up until Saturday morning as the two sides worked out the occasionally contentious details of the no-move, no-trade clause. “Sometimes, it’s good for a team to get their nose rubbed in it”.

“Probably I was thinking too much when it was going to be done, how it was going to be done and everything”, Kopitar said. “I was hoping that it was going to get done and I was leaning towards getting it done then doubting it, so I never really thought that far”.

Already, he has nine years worth of National Hockey League service time spent exclusively with the Kings. Guys get rewarded for winning Stanley Cups.

The guess here is that Kopitar will prove to be worth every penny. When you are leaking goals and your top forwards are not scoring, nearly impossible to win.

Kopitar is the latest Kings player to be secured under a long-term contact, joining Jonathan Quick, Jeff Carter, Dustin Brown, Drew Doughty, Marian Gaborik, Jake Muzzin, Alec Martinez and Kyle Clifford. But with Kopitar’s contract locked in, the only future the team is looking toward now is to the Stanley Cup playoffs and their chances of getting back into the post season. Lecavalier, recently arrived from Philadelphia, had high words of praise for his newest teammate.

At the halfway mark this season, Kopitar’s name was mentioned as being in contention for the Selke again this year, though he wasn’t named as a finalist. “He’s just so smooth, and a great leader, too”. “You never know what’s going to happen”. It just makes building around them a little more hard, and it might mean they have to say goodbye to a player like Milan Lucic in free agency.