What would you make of Jonathan Quick’s efforts in 2013?
He was inconsistent for most of the regular season, but he did get better towards the end and then truly broke out in the playoffs. At the same time, the Kings couldn’t get much done offensively in the postseason and thus had to rely on him to be near flawless to win -- which he wasn’t against Chicago in the Western Conference finals.
When asked to evaluate his own season, he seemed to regard it as, at best, a mixed bag.
“It wasn’t good enough, obviously,” Quick told LA Kings Insider. “I wasn’t very good throughout the regular season. I got a little better later in the season. I played pretty good hockey for a couple rounds, and then I feel like it was a big letdown this past series. Obviously that feeling of underperforming the past five games is going to kind of sit with me for a while.
“You’re going to think about that all summer and for most of the off-season. Leading up to camp you’ll start to think about next season. So where I go from there, you feel that sting for a little bit and you take a week or two to rest and recover and then you get back at it.”
One thing Quick wanted to make clear is that his offseason back surgery wasn’t an issue at any point during this campaign.
“If I felt I wasn’t a hundred percent in January, I would’ve told the coach and I wouldn’t have been playing,” Quick said.
2013-14 marks the start of the 27-year-old’s 10-year, $58,000,000 contract. A deal of that length is a gamble to give to a goaltender regardless of his previous accomplishments, but Quick certainly does have an impressive history of success.