Tonight’s game at the Broadmoor World Arena will be a homecoming for Trevor Lewis, the Utahn who played two seasons with the Colorado Springs-based Pikes Peak Miners minor hockey team.
Lewis, who attended high school in Colorado Springs, recorded 67 and 118 points in his 15 and 16-year-old seasons with the Miners, laying the foundation that allowed him to move on the Des Moines Buccaneers, from whom the Kings selected him 17th overall in the 2006 NHL Draft. From there, Lewis played with the Owen Sound Attack and Manchester Monarchs before joining Los Angeles.
He’s planning on seeing his former billet family after the game at the facility that he grew familiar with.
“There are three sheets here,” Lewis said. “We used to practice at the other two quite a bit. The people that I billeted with, their son played for Colorado College, so we always came down and watched the games. It was pretty cool.”
Though accustomed to the surroundings, there will still be an adjustment period later today when the Kings face a Colorado Avalanche team at a high elevation on an Olympic-sized ice sheet. The corners of the rink didn’t appear to be rounded as smoothly as corners in NHL rinks, and the almost rectangular ice surface provided some interesting bounces and caroms at the morning skate.
“Well, [the Avalanche are] probably not used to playing on Olympic, either,” Lewis said. “There’ll be a lot of room out there, and it’ll probably take a little adjustment to get the angles down. There’s a lot of room behind the net. It’ll probably take a little adjustment, but those first few shifts you should probably get it figured out a little bit.”
Trevor Lewis, on whether the team is happy with its progression in the preseason:
I think so. I think everyone’s trying to get back on track and just kind of clean up the little things that you don’t necessarily work on in the summer and stuff. It’s nice to just get some games back and get the pace back and stuff like that.
Lewis, on what he’d like to see cleaned up over the final two preseason games:
Probably a little bit of both. I don’t think guys are in midseason form yet. Just getting the reads down and [executing] the forecheck and getting your reads down and stuff like that, it’s stuff you don’t really work on in the summer, so it’s good to just kind of get out there and feel it again.
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