Scuderi speaking up

Rob Scuderi, vocal leader? It doesn’t seem likely. By all accounts, Scuderi is a very intelligent guy and, given that he won the Stanley Cup last season, he clearly knows something about winning, but if you spent any amount of time in the Kings’ locker room, you certainly wouldn’t identify Scuderi as a vocal leader. He does almost nothing to draw attention to himself and might have a quiet conversation with a guy sitting around him, but that’s about it.

He’s great to deal with, by the way. The day he signed with the Kings, I talked to him, and he had a bad cell-phone connection. He apologized profusely for something that happens to everyone, every day. Still, Scuderi didn’t seem like the type who would be getting his teammates going between periods, which made this anecdote from Terry Murray interesting to me…

MURRAY: “He’s been a real good player for us, a good addition on the back end with his play. In my conversations with him, when we first made the deal, by phone, there was not a lot of chatter. Same in meetings when we first actually met and had an opportunity to sit down and talk. There was a pretty quiet player, in my view.

“But by chance, I walked in at the end of a period, and he’s the guy that’s leading the way with the vocal part of it, what we need to correct, what we need to do better, what we need to give a big focus to going into the next period. It kind of caught me by surprise. It’s great to hear. When you sign a player as a free agent, a veteran player, you’re hoping that there is a lot more to the deal than just a good hockey player, that there’s leadership in the dressing room, contribution on the verbal side of it. I was very pleasantly surprised.”

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