LA Kings Dustin Brown Has New Perspective On Winning And Losing

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EL SEGUNDO, CA — Just one game short of having two series under his belt in the 2013 Stanley Cup Playoffs, not to mention having won the Stanley Cup last season, Los Angeles Kings winger and captain Dustin Brown now has a strikingly different outlook about hockey than he did prior to the Kings winning the 2012 Stanley Cup Championship.

“You always remember what it feels like to lose,” said Brown, who began his National Hockey League career with the Kings in 2003-04, playing on a lot of poor-to-mediocre teams that did a lot more losing than winning. “You almost have to lose before you learn how to win. It’s a motivating factor.”

“When you have that feeling, it stays with you, and vice versa, after what we did last year, I always say you don’t really know what you’re playing for until you’ve won it, so my perspective on the playoffs this year has been completely different than my perspective in previous years,” added Brown. “I don’t think I fully understood what exactly we were playing for until we put ourselves over the top.”

“It’s kind of the same way with losing. It’s hard to understand what it takes to win until you lose.”

Even better for the Kings, now that he has won the Stanley Cup, Brown is unwilling to settle for anything else.

“Dustin Brown said it best, and talk about a guy who’s grown,” Kings President/General Manager Dean Lombardi during an interview back in January 2013. “He said, ‘you know what, Dean? One thing I realize now…when we lost in the first round the last couple of years, it didn’t bother me. But now that I know what it’s like to win, if we don’t win again, I’m going to be pissed.’”

“That’s exactly what you want,” Lombardi added. “That’s the upside. Now you’ve got a guy saying, ‘if we don’t win, I’m going to be pissed.’ That’s a very different mindset: ‘now that I’ve experienced it, I don’t want anyone else to have it.’”

“When he said that to me, I thought, ‘wow, that’s pretty good.’”

Indeed.

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