INSIDER: Teammates Reflect on 1,500 Games of Anze Kopitar

1,500 Games.

How rare is it to see someone in the NHL play 1,500 regular-season games?

Well, how about some basic math.

There are approximately eight billion people in the world.

Per NHL.com, as of Tuesday, 8,762 people have played in at least one NHL regular-season game. The odds of someone reaching the NHL? Approximately 1 in 1 million.

Included in those 8,762 are players like Angus Booth, Kenny Connors and Jared Wright, who have all played exactly one NHL game, which came for all three players on Monday evening in Los Angeles. There are a lot of people in between Booth, Connors and Wright and Patrick Marleau, the all-time regular-season games played leader with 1,779. 

But not all that many in the 1,500 club.

In fact, only 24 players in NHL history have played in 1,500 career NHL regular-season games. Soon to become 25. The odds of a random person from the world becoming an NHL player who plays in 1,500 career games? Approximately 1 in 350 million.  

Now, those 24, to be 25 players have gotten to that point in a number of different ways. Marleau, for example, did play in 1,500 games with one franchise – the San Jose Sharks – but he also went elsewhere in his career. Jaromir Jagr, who has played the fourth-most games in NHL history, did so while playing for nine different teams. NINE. 

Others took a different approach. 

Legendary Detroit defenseman Niklas Lidstrom holds the record for most games played with one franchise without ever playing for another, with 1,564 regular-season games. In total, seven players have played 1,500 games for one franchise, including Marleau and Lidstrom. The most recent to do so is the only active player on that list – Alex Ovechkin. Until tomorrow, that is.

So. What are the odds that a random person in the world would not only make the NHL, not only play in 1,500 career NHL games and also do so with one team?

Greater than 1 in a billion.

What if we also wanted to discover the odds of that player being from Slovenia, a nation that has produced exactly two NHL players. 

You probably get the gist.

When the LA Kings hit the ice tomorrow evening at Crypto.com Arena, Anze Kopitar will take part in his 1,500th NHL regular-season game. 

What’s been funny to me through the second half of his final NHL season is the lack of awareness of just how rare a player playing 1,500 regular-season games is. There is a ton of coverage of Kopitar’s final season and his pursuit of Marcel Dionne’s all-time franchise record for points as a member of the Kings organization. And rightfully so. That’s a historic honor, when he gets there. But think of it this way. There are 32 franchises and Kopitar will become just the 25th player to reach 1,500 games. It’s actually rarer to play in 1,500 regular-season games than it is to lead a franchise in scoring, which is pretty incredible to think about.

“Yeah, it's crazy, 1,500, I know I'm coming up on 700, I feel like that's a lot, but you think about 1,500 and that’s a long ways to go,” forward Adrian Kempe said. “I've said this so many times, but how tremendous he is as a player, as a linemate as well, he’s still doing it at 38, it's really impressive to be out there to still see what he can do.”

You get to a point where you just start to run out of things to say.

But one thing that I think it easy to focus on is that it’s not by accident. You can look at the math and break it down as I did above. You can say well, someone out of that pool of people has to hit those marks, if that’s what the numbers say. But there’s a reason it’s Kopitar who got to that point, especially at the end of his career. The work he puts in to prepare, maintain and recover each and every day, to play later in his career, is one that teammates have noticed. 

“We're lucky, we get to see him every day, you see how he treats his body, the recovery he does, his work ethic, what he puts in his body,” defenseman Mikey Anderson said of Kopitar. “It's impressive to play that many games, but with one team he's done it and he's played at a high level for pretty much 1,500 of the. Yeah, it's really impressive. We're lucky to get to learn from him, to get to have him here, to have him be a part of our life.”

It also does not come without sacrifice. 

Along the way, Kopitar has played through injuries, including a few here over the last two seasons, certainly. That's the kind of thing that players notice. They see when someone is giving 100 percent, even when they don't have 100 percent to give. That's been the case more often than you realize when it comes to Kopitar. A big part of playing as many games as he has.

"It just shows you how big of a warrior he is, he's played through so many injuries, even in the past two years that I've played with him, so I couldn't imagine [how many] throughout his whole career," defenseman Joel Edmundson said. "He's the leader of this organization, everyone looks up to him, it's just for those small reasons."

That’s just who Kopitar has been.

He is a guy who has gone about his career in the NHL the right way. He’s never really chased individual accolades at the expense of team success. That fact that he’s amassed 1,300 career points, playing on a team like the Kings, who have never chased offense while he’s been here, is even more amazing. The matchups he’s logged over the years, the hard minutes on the penalty kill, make it that much more impressive. 

It's for those reasons that Kopitar has often flown under the radar on a national scale. I mean, the 70-point center playing Selke-caliber defense is never going to flash all that often on highlight reels, especially when he wins the opening faceoff at 10:30 PM Eastern on most nights. But the level he’s brought in Los Angeles, over the years, has rarely been matched around the league in his time.  

His teammates in Los Angeles are happy that his final season, along with milestones like this, are thrusting what he’s accomplished into the spotlight. 

“He's been a guy that is okay staying out of the limelight his entire career, but it means a lot that people are really taking the time to appreciate him as much as we've appreciated him his entire career, as long as I've been here and I know before that too,”  defenseman Brandt Clarke added. “It's obviously really special, it's a great milestone for him, he's just going to play it as another game, because that's just the kind of person he is, but the fact that he's kind of closing on all these records and people are actually appreciating him the way he deserves, we like to see that, because that’s what he deserves.”

It is what Kopitar deserves.

And it's not just for the player he is, but the person that his teammates have seen over the years as well. 

The kind of guy you want welcoming younger players into your organization. The kind of person who takes care of those around him, sometimes at the expense of himself. That's the kind of guy you want around, for as long as Kopitar has been. 

"Obviously he's an unbelievable player, but he almost a better person," defenseman Jacob Moverare said. "He's just such a good person to lean on, with everything. Even things like he lent me his golf clubs when I needed them. It's stuff like that, that maybe people don't care about, but he's just such an unbelievable person. He's helped me anything he can."

When Kopitar hits the ice tomorrow, he’ll join an extremely exclusive group of players and likely people as well. 

Certainly hopeful it’s not the last celebration of a Kopitar milestone this season, but rather the first of several to come.

The Kings will honor Kopitar in April 2 for his collective legacy, as opposed to a ceremony for each individual mark. That’s of his choosing, considering the importance of each game here and, frankly, the fact that we’d potentially have three or four pre-game ceremonies if not for merging them together. Not that it would bother his teammates, who would likely celebrate him gladly. But his preference was to have one night to take it all in.

One night, for a player who has proven that the math of how rare he is would be far to difficult to calculate. Easier to just call him 1 of 1. Fitting, for number 11 in Los Angeles.