Time waits for no man, and Rob Scuderi knows that all too well. A veteran of nearly 800 NHL games, he finished up his playing career with AHL Ontario in January 2017. It was a game in Tucson, a far cry from how he ended his college career — skating off with the National Championship, as he and his Boston College teammates had just defeated North Dakota in overtime.
Not every ending comes with a storybook finish; and the New York native likely has no regrets. He has a loving family, made plenty of money and won Stanley Cups in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles. For the past few years, he’s been working for Nashville, serving as a development coach for young Predators prospects who want to learn the finer points of becoming an NHL defenseman.
We recently caught up with him for a look down memory lane, as one of his former teammates will join him in retirement next summer, Anze Kopitar.
It was a conversation that quickly took Scuderi back to right around this time of year in 2009. He had just signed a four-year contract to come to LA, leaving the only NHL organization he knew and the one that had drafted him out of college. Kopitar was entering his fourth season with the Kings.
“When I first arrived, and I would imagine this reflects on Kopi’s entire career, he was just completely understated,” Scuderi began. “You show up, and you hear that he’s kind of a big-time player. But then you show up, and you start to see some of the special things he could do day in and day out. The reason why I feel maybe he never got some of the higher credit he deserves is because he made it all look so easy and so effortless. So, it wasn’t a surprise to me that after hearing, ‘Yeah, he’s pretty good’ and then you get there and you go, ‘Man, this guy is pretty special!’ and it was certainly a privilege to be his teammate and he’s a big reason why we were able to have success.”
As the years went by in Los Angeles, Scuderi also had a front row seat for the maturation of Kopitar, both the man and the player.
“I think that, naturally, once you have experiences, you grow as a player and as a leader,” explained the former NHL rearguard. “I would say, I saw the natural growth occur with Kopi. Now that doesn’t mean there was anything dramatic. He’s always very, very humble and very consistent — on and off the ice. He has a wonderful family, nice people and really strong base at home. I just mean that it wasn’t that he had huge growth from these massive steps, but you could just tell from when I left and returned two and half years later — that time period where I wasn’t on the Kings teams — you could see that natural growth. I’m not going to say it was staggering, but it was almost kind of funny that he’d ended up the way that you thought he would. He didn’t disappoint.”
Back in the day, Scuderi was a go-to guy for Mayor’s Manor. We could almost always get a humerous story or quip out of him. From the funny one-liners launched at Drew Doughty or competing with Dustin Brown over who was more boring, Scuderi often found his way into the stories back then. There was even the time he admitted to having a really creepy looking mustache.
When it comes to Kopitar, though, he’s still playing it right down the middle.
“He was always great company,” noted Scuderi. “He was always easy to have dinner with. A lovely home life and there was a healthy balance between what he did at the rink and what he did at home. We’d play cards, hang out, have a few drinks if we were on an off day or what have you. He was just always the easiest and most pleasant of company.”
In a season expected to be filled with many ‘final moments’ this will be LA’s only stop in Nashville. Thus, expect some sort of tribute from the Predators before or during the game.
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