Luc Robitaille was a Rollerblading Pioneer

When the world ground to a halt last year because of the pandemic, arenas closed their doors and hockey players from all levels were suddenly shut out of their sport. But as winter retreated, giving way to warmer weather, a new trend emerged.
With it unclear as to when sports would return, it appeared as though fans and players everywhere had rediscovered rollerblading... including myself.
Although he wasn't a part of the rollerblading renaissance last year, LA Kings president Luc Robitaille couldn't help but smile at the phenomenon and think back to his younger days. Robitaille, after all, was an early adopter of rollerblades.
Back in the early 1980s, when Rollerblade Inc., a Minneapolis-based company, brought its in-line skate to the market, it didn't take long before Robitaille had his own pair.

"Rollerblades came out in Minnesota and they made a deal with a few guys in Quebec and one of the distributors happened to be a guy I knew and he sold me a pair," Robitaille recalled.
At the time, Robitaille was still playing junior with the Hull Olympiques of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League. He didn't know much about in-line skating and when asked if he wanted to go with a hard wheel, which were better for speed, or a soft wheel for an emphasis on training, he went with the latter.
Despite scoring 32 goals and 85 points in his first season of junior, NHL clubs wary of Robitaille because of his concerns about his skating ability. Robitaille knew what the scouts were saying about him but he embraced his new set of wheels as an opportunity to improve his skating.
"Everything I did then was to improve my game," Robitaille recalled. "I knew you couldn't stop the same and turn the same, but I clearly remember practicing my first three steps. I tried to make my stride longer, so I would stretch it and do small sprints."
Practicing on his street, Robitaille would accelerate into a sprint and then repeat the drill over and over until those first three strides became more explosive.
Rollerblading also gave Robitaille an unanticipated edge on game days. Since the technology was still rather new, the boots were heavy and clunky. While that wasn't always great for skating around, it wasn't necessarily a bad thing when you took them off and then hit the ice in a much lighter skate boot.
"When there was no snow, I would actually go skating with those before a game because it would make my skates feel a lot lighter on the ice," Robitaille said.
Even after the Kings took Robitaille in the ninth round of the NHL Entry Draft, there were still doubts that he would make it to the big leagues. Robitaille, however, kept working at it and continued to make rollerblading an important part of his offseason training regime.
When he eventually made it out to Los Angeles a couple of years later, scoring 45 goals in his rookie season and winning the Calder Trophy, becoming the first and still the only Kings player to win the award, Robitaille credited rollerblading in helping him make the transition. "I would say that rollerblading had a huge impact on my career to help me get to that level," he said.

As he established himself as one of the NHL's rising stars, Robitaille increasingly focused his attention to his on-ice performance, but he never abandoned the rollerblades. During the sunny offseason he used to skate regularly from just north of Malibu Beach to Venice Beach, a distance of roughly 15 miles.
But when Robitaille wasn't wheeling around for fun under the warmth of the southern California sun, he began playing roller hockey in the offseason. Following his first season with the Kings, some of his Canadian friends started playing roller hockey at Santa Monica Beach, often times using overturned garbage cans as makeshift nets.
Robitaille believes they were some of the first people he saw do that and he soon joined in with them. Looking back, he chuckles at the thought of those garbage can nets and how, nearly three decades later, roller hockey is now a staple in Santa Monica every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, but they, of course, have ditched the garbage cans.
Before we end our conversation on this subject, I can't help but blurt out to Robitaille that I too had caught the rollerblading bug. Although I didn't get into last summer, I told him I wasn't going to make the same mistake this year.
As I explain my routine of playing roller hockey in a tennis court near my work on my lunch breaks and on the weekends, and even embarrassingly divulge that I think my skating has already improved in just a few short months, I pause. I have the most prolific left wing in NHL history on the line and here I am talking about my rollerblading exploits!
But Robitaille just laughs and says 'that's awesome.' He gets it. After all, if anyone were to appreciate a rollerblading story, it's Robitaille.
While the rollerblading pioneer hasn't been out in a few years, it seems as though the sport's resurgence has still had an impact on him and his family. "I still have my rollerblades and my son actually borrowed them from me the other day, funny enough," he said.