Almost nothing about Brian Boyle’s NHL career thus far has gone according to script. He was drafted out of Higham, MA as a center in 2003 and spent four years at Boston College. But this season, he was assigned to the Kings’ Manchester affiliate as a defenseman. He played forty-seven games there and was second amongst the league’s rookies with forty-three points (21-22-43). As you’ve likely gathered, he didn’t stay on defense that whole time.

He finally got called up to the NHL a couple of weeks ago but couldn’t find a flight from New Hampshire to Newark, NJ and ended up hiring a driver to take him to the game (five hours away). He got there five minutes before the puck dropped and missed part of the first period. His dad, who lives not too far away, might have come to his debut, except that he had pneumonia.

But if all of that sounds a bit out of whack, consider this. Boyle is also not following the traditional rookie plot-line of laying low, getting in his touches, and playing safe minutes. Instead, the kid is shooting and scoring, putting up numbers that are making the people who drafted him five years ago look like geniuses. (You know who they are. Most of them work in Dallas now.)

He got a goal and an assist in his first game, against the Devils, and has since appeared in seven total games with four goals and one assist. Friday night against the Flames, he notched a goal on a play where he tried to go between the defense and when that didn’t work, snapped off a shot that beat Miikka Kiprusoff cleanly.

Why? According to him, “I’m, when I get a chance to shoot, I’m pretty confident. When I get in an open area and get a chance to shoot, my eyes light up. I get excited. Playing at this level, guys give you the puck in some good areas.”

“The coaches have told me, ‘Don’t change your game,’ and that’s reassuring. Sometimes, you think you don’t want to make a mistake, you don’t want to try anything and be offensive, but that’s what got you where you’re at. So it was good to hear that [license to play his game] from Coach.”

His coach Marc Crawford complimented him after the Calgary game, his first in LA. “Boyle is such a big body. He scored a great goal. You see his hands tonight on the goal, and he’s such a big body, he creates so much space. He’s a handful to handle in front of the net, and he creates space for players that can dangle and handle the puck.”

His success isn’t exactly a surprise, however, if you look at his history. Boyle’s background paragraph in the media information scans like this: team leader this, All-Star that, First Team this, All-Tournament that—a list of awards and distinctions that indicate both success amongst his Eagle teammates and his premier position in the NCAA. As mentioned, he continued his run into the AHL with high point production.

And then there’s his size. Boyle sits on a bench in the Kings dressing room, and almost looks me eye-to-eye. I’m not particularly short at 5’10”, but this guy is tall. They list him at 6’6”, and he’s every bit of it. His weight is given as 222, and that’s probably about right. Except that on most athletes, figuring even a low body fat percentage of, say four, that would be about nine pounds of fat. On this guy, the percentage must be a bare one or two. Do that math. That means that this guy is nearly 220 pounds of muscle.

His arms tell the story. The biceps are huge and round, kind of like the little bowling balls used in the Canadian game called “five-pin.” If he’s going to put on any more size as he heads to his mid-20s (Boyle is 22 now), he’ll be a giant. A giant with hands.

To recap thus far, we have a guy who had an odd beginning, a successful early run, a good history, and great physical potential. There’s one more thing. Actually two.

Boyle is smart, and he’s mature. Most NHL rookies talk to you as if there’s someone standing right beside them monitoring every answer. You get the same old thing: “I want to make the most of it, enjoy the experience, great fans here in LA [or wherever], cliché, cliché, cliché.” They act polite, but paranoid.

Boyle isn’t like that. He answers questions inventively. His language skills are highly developed (I get to say that—I have a PhD in English and have taught writing and literature classes to college students for a decade); he’s smart.

Case in point. When asked about being played as a defenseman in Manchester, he said, “It was frustrating actually, you know, a lot of hard work. It was a little bit mentally straining, but it was good because they played me a lot on D even though some nights I didn’t deserve it. That’s what I think, anyway.”

He’s not sure why the team assigned him to the position, actually. With a laugh when asked, he says, “You’re going to have to ask them. I played, I think it was, the last eight games of college. [In fact, he earned All-Tournament honors as a d-man at the NCAA Tournament’s Northeast Regional lat year].”

The rationale, according to Crawford, was partly his size, and the fact that he’d played defense at BC. “Looking at our depth in the organization, we don’t have a lot of top-flight young defenseman coming up. We saw this kid that was 6’7” and knew that he had played on defense on the penalty kill at Boston College for most of his career. Plus, we knew it would teach him about playing defensively. That’s the process with most young players—they have to learn how to play without the puck; you have to learn to compete. We thought that he could play defense, though it turns out that his foot speed probably wasn’t good enough, and so Christmas or early December they made the switch back to center. He had played center on most of the power plays down there [Manchester] and so we knew he was a good offensive player with a good shot.”

The experiment wasn’t a loss, as Boyle did learn a lot. “I learned how important it is for a center to get low. A good low center can make a huge difference. So when they switched me back to center, I kept that with me. It took me a while to find my stride again, though. It was definitely a good experience, though it was a little more frustrating than I thought it would be.” His honestly bespeaks a maturity that is rare for any twenty-two year-old employee in any business, let alone one where the work is done before eighteen thousand critical bosses on a nightly basis.

Again Crawford: “He’s got a chance to be a very good player. He has to continue to use his size, use his reach, and continue to battle in [all] zones. We love his size and we love his shot, and we think we can teach him the other stuff.”

Now does being smart make you a good hockey player? Of course, being hockey-smart does. But we’re talking here about just plain smart. Is that going to help him stick in the league, maybe make a top-six forward someday?

Who knows? This guy probably would make a career of hockey simply because he has size and what appears at this stage to be a kind of luck on his side. But because he’s bright, he’s got potential to be a leader, and at the very least, Brian Boyle is someone who makes an interview seem like a most worthwhile exercise.

It makes you pull for the guy.

Kings Notes

Michael Cammalleri was scratched against the Flames. Rob Blake and Ladislav Nagy are on IR.

The Kings, despite being in the cellar and ignored by much of the hockey world, are quietly putting on quite a run. They’re 10-5-1 in their last sixteen games, more than half of which were on the road. Friday night, they whipped up on Calgary, beating them 6-3 and taking every loose puck and turning the play in their favor.

The team now has a two-game series against Phoenix (at least, that’s what we say—can two of anything be, by definition, a series?), in Arizona Saturday and at Staples on Monday.

Photo Gallery: Kings vs. Flames, 02/15/08

Growing Up Hockey

Brian Kennedy wants to hear your hockey stories. Go to http://www.growinguphockey.com to find out about his book, Growing Up Hockey, and to share tales of your own.