On a team with 12 players who have been drafted to NHL franchises, undrafted sophomore forward Carter King (Calgary, Alberta) would be an unlikely candidate to be Denver’s key to repeating as national champions, but he is just that. After making himself a valuable member of last year’s championship team as a fourth-liner and penalty-kill specialist, King has emerged as a third-line center, who has added offensive firepower to his already solid defensive game.
King’s road to becoming an essential part of one of the best college hockey programs in the nation has not been a traditional one. He came to Denver midway through the 2020-21 season, wrecked by COVID-19, after his junior hockey season in Canada got canceled.
According to King, DU “brought up the idea of coming to [collegiate play] early and using the extra year of eligibility the NCAA made available to everyone … to gain some experience.”
Coming into a new environment with a tight-knit group was not the easiest thing, and King found that getting playtime was a challenge, only appearing in three games during that season.
Since that COVID-19 season, King has climbed his way up the lineup by doing the dirty work in the defensive zone and on the penalty kill. This year, King has become an elite face-off aficionado, with Head Coach David Carle admiring this contribution.
“The biggest thing he’s added this year is faceoffs,” Carle said. “He didn’t play center last year and his faceoffs have continued to progress and get better and better this year. He’s seen his minutes go up because of that, and he’s become a really reliable two-way centerman that adds a lot of stability,” he continued.
His success at the faceoff dot is reflected in the numbers too, with King winning 54.8% of his faceoffs in his first 22 games, a number which ranks seventh in the NCHC and first on the DU roster.
King has also added offense to his game, scoring 15 points through 23 games this season, already exceeding his totals from last year. With so much talent on the team, King has had to find a way to differentiate himself from the pack. According to him, he does this by playing his game.
“Everyone has different characteristics to their game. As soon as you try to leave what you are trying to do and try to become someone else, it doesn’t work,” he said.
However, King has had to improve within the framework of his game. Along with the aforementioned improvements on the faceoff dot, another thing Coach Carle mentioned as an area of improvement was his ability to hang onto the puck in the offensive zone.
“He can get people on his hip, he can possess the puck and extend possession for us and attack inside the dots off [of] that. He has made himself a more dangerous offensive player,” Carle said.
This improvement is all the more extraordinary given King’s academic commitments. He is a molecular biology major, one of the most academically challenging majors offered at DU. “The guys in the room respect how he prepares both academically and athletically,” Carle said.
“Being a molecular biology major, it is what I want to do,” King insisted. “I came here knowing that whatever happens with hockey, I want to be able to get a good education and get a good degree and it is what I love doing.” He continued, “while it gets busy, you can find time to balance things.”
Last year, DU won a national championship thanks in large part to their brilliant center depth, but with two of their three top centers gone, somebody is going to have to step up if they want to repeat, and that somebody is Carter King, the unheralded biology major.
