Homecoming: Trevor Lewis Talks Return To LA

It’s a seemingly normal June day in Salt Lake City, Utah and Trevor Lewis is back in his hometown after spending two seasons playing for the Calgary Flames, exhausting his most recent contract. Lewis has just pulled into his driveway, having arrived home from a workout, and the phone rings before he can even get into the house. It’s his agent.

“L.A. wants to know if you’d be interested,” his agent says.

“Well, what did you tell them?” Lewis asks.

“I didn’t tell them anything, I wanted to check with you first.”

“Definitely yes,” Lewis says.

“What about your wife?”

“I’m sure she’ll say yes,” says Lewis, whose wife, Kara, isn’t home at the moment.

“Check with her and get back to me.”

Lewis was drafted by the LA Kings in the first round, 17th overall, in the 2006 NHL Entry Draft. He was only 19 years old when he first arrived in Los Angeles, and by his own account, just a young kid.

“It was kind of eye-opening being around some guys I’ve watched my whole life play, and then I went to Manchester for a couple years and kind of had to learn what I had to do to be successful and to play in LA," Lewis rcounted. "I came here and luckily I had some young guys with me like Drew [Doughty] and Wayne Simmonds, and [Alec] Martinez, and [Kyle] Clifford, and we kind of grew up together. We were fortunate to have each other at the time and have those guys to hang out with."

The Kings won their Stanley Cup Championships in 2012 and 2014, no doubt an era that die-hards will remember for the rest of their lives.

The core group of players who were together for both Cups will likely forever have a place in the hearts of those fortunate enough to have experienced that part of Los Angeles history. But, what people may not remember, is that so many of those players whose names appear twice for the Kings on Lord Stanley’s cup were just growing up and learning to live on their own during that time period. They were just starting to experience life.

“Cooking was a big one,” recalls Lewis, whose first full season with the Kings was the 2010-11 campaign. “My first few years, Kyle Clifford and I lived together and he only eats steak and potatoes and we both kind of had to learn how to cook potatoes. We knew how to cook steak, but yeah, it was very new. We were going out to eat a lot and we didn’t really know what to do at the grocery store. Luckily we had his girlfriend, Paige, that would come down and stock our fridge from time to time, and put some lasagnas in the freezer, stuff like that. That was definitely one of the biggest learning experiences.”

Figuring out how to be an adult was made easier by having a solid group of veterans around, from whom Lewis would benefit. Not only did he learn how to be a professional at the rink, but he was never left alone on holidays.

“Whether it was Jarret Stoll or Matt Greene, they always offered for us to come over and have dinners,” Lewis remembers, fondly. “I think Jackie Quick was our main stop for Thanksgiving dinner and I think I had the record at the Quicks’ house for Thanksgiving just because we did it in Manchester too.”

Over the course of his first 12 seasons with the Kings, Lewis amassed 674 regular season games played, 163 points, including 70 goals, and played every single playoff game during both championship runs in 2012 and 2014. Lewis tallied two goals in the Cup-clinching Game 6 against the New Jersey Devils in 2012.

During his time in Los Angeles, Lewis ended up meeting his wife, Kara. In 2020 when Lewis left the Kings, the fact that they all had kids was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to explaining how much he had grown up since that first training camp in LA.

“A couple kids and I became a dad, and that’ll make you grow up real fast,” admits Lewis, whose twins, Boone and Brix were born in April of 2018. “I think I knew a lot more about myself and obviously my family is everything to me and I had them for my support. Coming home from the rink now compared to back then when you only think about hockey and now you come home to your kids and you get your mind away from [the rink] a little bit which is nice and those hours you get to just be a dad, it’s pretty awesome.”

His previous contract with the Kings expired in the summer of 2020 and when the 2019-20 season was abruptly interrupted due to the Covid pandemic, not only was there no finality to Lewis’ time with the Kings but there was uncertainty surrounding his career. Lewis, the winner of a record seven LA Kings Unsung Hero awards, as voted on by his teammates, wasn’t sure where or if he’d still be playing hockey when the NHL regular season resumed in January of 2021.

Lewis earned a one-year contract after an impressive training-camp tryout with the Winnipeg Jets - a contract he didn’t sign until opening day of the Covid-shortened 2020-21 season. While he feels his time with the Jets was successful and he enjoyed himself, it was a difficult year for his family in Winnipeg.

“It was a tough year to be there just because nothing was open and you couldn’t really go outside because it was too cold," he recalled. "The kids were kind of trapped in the house all the time and we kind of had to get them out of there just so they could get out of the house."

At the end of that season, Lewis moved on to play two seasons with the Flames, which reunited him with former Kings Tyler Toffoli, Milan Lucic, Brad Richardson, and former Kings Head Coach Darryl Sutter. He and Kara welcomed another daughter, Maxwell, in April of 2022, and by then his kids had grown accustomed to the cold and were having a good time in Canada.

But, for Lewis and his family, Los Angeles is a special place to be.

When he hung up with his agent that day in June, he called Kara right away. She didn’t answer.

“I’m kind of waiting because I’m so excited and I knew she was going to be so excited too, so she called me back and I just said ‘I got a call that LA wants to know if you’d be interested in going back’ and she broke down crying on the phone and was like ‘yes, of course, it’s what we’ve always wanted,’” admits Lewis. “I called [my agent] right back and he’s like ‘well, we knew what your answer would be, but I just wanted you to be able to tell your wife.’ So it was kind of a cool moment and things kind of developed from there.”

Over the years, Lewis has kept in touch with guys like Clifford, Doughty, Martinez, Quick and Anze Kopitar. In fact, he was invited to Martinez’s Stanley Cup party this past summer after he won the Cup with the Vegas Golden Knights. He had to decline the party invitation, however, because it happened to fall on the weekend he was moving back to LA, and Boone and Brix had to be back to start school.

In his second stint here in Los Angeles, Lewis has two kids in kindergarten and while Lewis is at the rink most of the day, Kara, even with 16-month old Maxwell - whom they call ‘Miss Sass,’ still at home - is trying to figure out how to use her new-found free time. The first chance they got, Trevor and Kara made a beeline for Izaka-ya by Katsu-ya for sushi, and then Nick’s in Manhattan Beach shortly after that. Needless to say, everyone is adjusting well.

“The kids absolutely love going to school and sometimes they don’t even want to come home, they just want to keep playing,” laughs Lewis, who is planning a trip soon to Disneyland for his kids. “Coming back to the beach, that’s the first thing they want to do, that’s the only thing they talk about. They got to go to a game the other day and they kind of remember the ‘go Kings, go’ now, and so they had a lot of fun.”

Even though it’s currently rented out and the Lewis’ are in a different house this season, they do own a home in the South Bay, so LA as a permanent home might be in the cards one day. For now, Lewis’ primary focus is the present and doing what he can to help the LA Kings win on the ice.

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and after re-signing him in the summer, the Kings clearly knew what they were missing. So come the end of the season, Lewis may just have to concede an eighth year as the team’s Unsung Hero award recipient.

Because he’s not ‘unsung’ anymore.