LA Kings captain Anze Kopitar says he will retire after his upcoming 20th season

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EL SEGUNDO, Calif. (AP) — Kings captain Anze Kopitar says he will retire after the upcoming season, ending a 20-year NHL career spent entirely in Los Angeles.

The 38-year-old Kopitar made the announcement Thursday at a news conference with his family following the first practice of training camp.

“My mind is made up,” Kopitar said. “It was a hard decision, and I will put 100% of my energy into this season. I know I’m going to give it all and leave the game with a positive mindset.”

The Slovenian center has spent his entire hockey career and adult life with the Kings since his NHL debut as a teenager in October 2006. He is a five-time NHL All-Star, a two-time winner of the Selke Trophy as the NHL’s best defensive forward and a three-time winner of the Lady Byng Trophy for sportsmanlike play.

Most prominently, he was a star power forward on both of the Kings’ only Stanley Cup-winning teams in 2012 and 2014. He is the second-leading scorer in franchise history, and he expressed pride at being able to accomplish the rare feat of playing an entire lengthy career with one team.

“For me, I always looked at LA as my team, as my home,” Kopitar said. “We always felt extremely comfortable here, so it didn’t really cross my mind to even think or explore to go anywhere else. Obviously the fact that we were the first team to bring the Cup to LA, it makes it special, and then to follow it up with another one, those are the core memories that you can’t just ignore, even sometimes when times were a little bit rough and we didn’t have a very competitive team.

“Those memories, and the guys around you that have won with you before, those are the reasons that I didn’t think about going anywhere else.”

Kopitar is still playing at an elite level after recording 21 goals and 46 assists last season, but he said he wants to have more time with his wife and soon-to-be-teenage children. He also plans to move his family back to Slovenia.

“We have a figure skater and a hockey player on our hands, so I want to be present for them, to be at their competitions and their games,” he said.

Kopitar’s 1,278 career points are 40th in NHL history, and he is just 29 points behind Marcel Dionne, the leading scorer in Kings history. He is the Kings’ franchise leader in games played with 1,454, and he was their leading scorer in 15 of his first 19 seasons.

Kopitar has been Los Angeles’ captain since 2016, and he even tried to put the team first in making his retirement declaration.

“Why announce now? I guess a simple way to put it is I want to get this out of the way now to where I’m not a distraction for the team,” Kopitar said. “For example, if we’re in a (playoff) fight coming down the stretch, the last thing I want to do is take any attention away from the team and put it on myself. I just felt this is the best time. But in saying that, I am looking extremely forward to this next season. I still have a lot of motivation. I’ve got a lot of energy, a lot of desire to compete at the very highest level, and the moves that we’ve made, I think we’re a better team than we were last year, and I just cannot wait to get going.”

New general manager Ken Holland has made several additions to a roster that will return most of the core from the team that tied two franchise records last season with 48 wins and 105 points. The Kings have made the playoffs in four consecutive seasons, but lost to Edmonton in the first round each time.

Kopitar made his announcement a few hours after the Los Angeles Dodgers announced that left-hander Clayton Kershaw also will end his lengthy career this season. Kershaw joined the Dodgers in 2008, two years after Kopitar arrived in LA.

“Must have been something in the universe for us to decide to do it on the same day,” a laughing Kopitar said of his friend.

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AP NHL: https://apnews.com/NHL