LOS ANGELES — It's easy to forget, now that Kings forward Gabriel Vilardi is dominating entire shifts and controlling the puck as if it were magnetized to his stick, that a bad back nearly ended his career before it could truly begin.
The problems that scared some NHL teams and led him to drop from a projected top-five pick in the 2017 draft to No. 11 lingered ominously, costing him precious training time and experience. He played about 80 games — the equivalent of one NHL season — over the next three seasons, through 2019-20.
"There were several months — I wouldn't say years, but several months — where I wasn't sure if I was going to be playing hockey for my life," he said, "which is pretty scary because it's all I'd ever known, all I ever wanted to do."
