NHL

It was his fourth goal of the playoffs, matching Minnesota’s Kirill Kaprizov and Matt Boldy for the NHL lead.

Draisaitl, who led the NHL with 52 goals, missed the final seven games of the regular season with a lower-body injury while McDavid, fourth in the league with 74 assists, missed nine of the final 14 games with a lower-body injury.

It’s an expensive commitment, one few other teams in the NHL have tried to match.

“He always talked about gaining that extra 3%. Trying to make the team better,” said Bill Ranford, the director of goaltending for the Kings, a job Ranford estimates just a half-dozen NHL teams have.

“So it’s just sort of the evolution of the NHL, the Kings sort of being early adopters of this. We’ve really been at the tip of the spear on a lot of these things.”