Inside Pierre-Luc Dubois’s dream-like transition to the Kings

Wake up from the nightmare, Pierre-Luc Dubois.

You’re sitting in your stall, hanging your head. What happened? Your Winnipeg Jets opened the Stanley Cup playoffs with a win over the Vegas Golden Knights, and then: loss, loss, loss, loss. Season over. Your coach tells reporters how disappointed and disgusted he is with everyone’s performance.

Wake up from the dream, Pierre-Luc Dubois.

You’re sunning on the beach between trips to the rink, wondering what you can buy next with your new $8.5 million salary. You’ve just returned from Australia, where you bonded with your new co-workers. You’re getting ready to compete on a Stanley Cup contender.

That’s the too long, didn’t read version of Dubois’ whirlwind offseason. After his tenure with the Winnipeg Jets ended on a flaccid note, everything happening in the months since has carried a euphoric quality. The power forward, 25, played all last season under the looming speculation of a divorce from the Jets. Now, his roots are growing with the L.A. Kings, where he will play the next eight seasons. And they couldn’t be happier to host a 6-foot-4, 214 pound center coming off seasons of 28 and 27 goals and carrying a nasty streak.

As Dubois sees it, the Kings having their training camp in Australia, in preparation for last week’s NHL Global Series, set a positive tone from Day 1. He was “starting camp on the other side of the world,” as he put it, spending concentrated time with his teammates and coaching staff.

“It’s funny, that trip, it accelerated getting to know everybody,” Dubois told Daily Faceoff this week. “I feel like I’ve already been here for a year.”

Dubois arrived in Los Angeles in August, and many of his new teammates were already there. He connected quickly with grizzled defensemen Matt Roy and Drew Doughty and youngsters Quinton Byfield and Jordan Spence. There was a natural, easy bond with fellow center Phillip Danault because of their French Canadian heritage, Dubois explains. While the Jets dressing room in recent seasons was known to be divided, leading to Blake Wheeler getting stripped of his captaincy, Dubois describes the Kings’ dressing room as one in which everyone does everything together and a different player seems to emerge as the most talkative and energetic personality on any given day.

It’s a fascinating observation from a player who, thus far in his NHL career, never seemed to want to settle down. Dubois requested a trade from the Columbus Blue Jackets before the 2020-21 season and got his wish, dealt to the Jets along with a third-round pick for Patrik Laine and Jack Roslovic. Dubois only put pen to paper one time as a Jet, signing a one-year pact last summer. Then came the second trade request of his career, just six seasons in. He was developing a reputation as a hockey nomad or, at worst, a malcontent, seemingly never comfortable in his environment. So what made him so eager to reverse course and make L.A. a long-term home?

It’s easy to understand the sun-soaked allure of any California market, sure, but there wasn’t necessarily a huge pitch to be made when the L.A. Kings worked out a trade with the Jets at the 2023 NHL Draft, landing him for Gabe Vilardi, Alex Iafallo, Rasmus Kupari and a 2024 second-round pick. Dubois already had an affinity for the Kings. As a CAA client who calls Pat Brisson his agent, Dubois had attended multiple prospect camps in L.A. at the Kings’ practice facility as a teenager. When the Blue Jackets or Jets visited the Kings, he typically had a day off at some point, during which he’d regularly go to lunch with Brisson and take in the city vibes.

“I feel like I knew the area, and Pat knows a lot about the organization, represents some guys on the team,” Dubois said. “A lot of questions I had, I talked to (Vladislav) Gavrikov a bit, who I already played with in Columbus, he helped me out. And all the questions he couldn’t answer, Pat was really helpful on making that decision easy for me.”

Yes, signing with L.A. involved very little arm-twisting for Dubois. But let’s dispel the myth of the miserable Canadian player playing in the coldest, most barren Canadian market. That wasn’t the case for him. Even if Winnipeg never quite felt like his long-term landing spot, he took plenty of positives away from his time there.

For one: the Canadian pressure cooker never overwhelmed Dubois. He jokes that his mother Jill tells him he sounds like a robot during interviews, but he’s actually one of the sport’s most candid talkers. He wasn’t one to shrink from the hype, even if it sometimes threatened to cross the line. It never felt foreign to him because he grew up in Rimouski, Que., where everyone, even the most casual sports fan, has hockey fandom in their blood.

“There’s a lot of pressure that comes with that – there’s a lot of passion,” he said. “I think pressure is passion. And passionate fans demand a lot. Maybe for some people it’s harder than others. I never felt it was a burden or it was too much (in Winnipeg). I think other way around, it’s fun to have those passionate fans. But sometimes it just gets dangerous with it going too far. You always hear that, ‘This guy’s the best player in the world,’ or ‘He had the best game of his life,’ but maybe he just had a really good game. And you hear the other way around, where ‘This guy just had the worst game of his life,’ when really it just wasn’t a great game. People tend to exaggerate, and that’s what gets hard, but at the end of the day it’s just passionate fans and a passionate fan base.”

Dubois had plenty of emotional attachment to Winnipeg, too. It was a special experience playing there while his father, Eric, worked as an assistant coach with the Jets’ AHL affiliate, the Manitoba Moose, who play their home games nine miles away from their parent club. That wasn’t easy for Dubois to let go of despite his desire for a fresh start.

“I think NHL players, one of the things you accept is that you’re going to be away from your family, unless you’re lucky enough to be in the same city as them, but that’s not the case for 99 percent of players,” he said. “Whenever I was in Columbus and my family got to come, I was extremely happy they got to see me play. And then I move to Winnipeg, my parents are there, and I get to see my Dad when he’s at home. Our schedules were kind of conflicting, so when I’d be at home he’d be on the road. But he’d come to every game he could come to. My mom would stop by. We lived 10 minutes apart from each other. I’d go see Moose games whenever I could. Honestly, it was almost a dream come true in that sense.”

So it thus wasn’t the “good riddance” farewell some might have perceived it to be when Dubois departed for L.A. That said: on his new team, he has already achieved a degree of comfort and work-life balance he didn’t know was possible.

“It feels like…it’s easy,” Dubois said. “When you’re away from the rink, you’re in the sun, you’re doing things, you can go to the beach. You can really go out there and enjoy life. So when you go to the rink, it’s easy to put your work boots on and concentrate fully on hockey and concentrate on being the best player you can be for your team. Because when you’re away from the rink, you get to do basically whatever you want. It feels at times like we’re on vacation away from the rink. It doesn’t feel real.”

The dichotomy is fascinating; chillin’ vibes off the ice help him switch on the intensity on the ice. That’s important given Dubois’ game is built around it. He’s a bull on the puck, the type of player whose game theoretically should make him built for the playoffs, as he has flashed at times, such as when he buried a hat trick against the Toronto Maple Leafs during their bubble series in 2019-20. Dubois isn’t a pure finisher, nor has he honed himself into a top-end defensive forward, but when he’s at his best he drives the play strongly on offense. He can flash dominance at times in a scoring-line role if flanked by dangerous wingers. While he consistently did have those in Winnipeg, he’s excited about Kevin Fiala on his left and Arthur Kaliyev on his right in L.A.

“They’re two great guys off the ice, so that makes it easier once you get on to gel and communicate,” Dubois said. “I’ve enjoyed getting to know them. And on the ice they’re two really good players. Kevin can make something happen out of nothing. He’s like a little magician out there that has two guys on him and all of a sudden he appears out of nowhere and is able to make a play. And Kaliyev, he can score from anywhere on the ice, he can be a threat from anywhere on the ice, and he knows it. He shoots the puck like nobody I’ve ever seen.”

On one hand, it’s easy for any player to pretty much vomit rainbows during the pre-season when talking about his new situation. But Dubois’ enthusiasm carries weight for two reasons: (a) he’s never been known as a player who sugarcoats his opinions, and (b) he is committed to the Kings for eight years. With Anze Kopitar 36 years old and not a lock to keep playing when his contract expires after 2025-26, the Kings need a long-term successor up the middle. Dubois seems ready to take on role over time.

After all, if the pressure gets too intense, he can book it down to the beach and find his Zen.