Changing Castles : Ziggy Palffy Will Leave His Mansion in New York for a Lead Role in L.A.’s Hockey Kingdom
It’s a large house, 4,700 square feet, and modern, with white walls broken by ground-to-roof segments of glass brick.
It’s built for entertaining the friends Ziggy Palffy has accumulated in six years in New York. There’s a large deck by a pool and a clay tennis court alongside. Inside, a long semicircular marble bar surrounds the kitchen, and the living room is split by a fireplace.
But it’s situated for solitude, on 2 1/2 lush acres bordered by trees. Flowers flank a paved lane that allows Palffy and girlfriend Zora Czoborova privacy.
Chez Ziggy is only five minutes from his old office, the ice at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, which is why he celebrated a five-year, $26-million contract by plunking down a healthy portion of the house’s $1.95-million asking price in April.
It’s almost 3,000 miles from his new job, the ice at Staples Center, where he goes to work this fall with the Kings.
If he had known then what he knows now, he could have saved himself a lot of money.
“It’s hard to leave, but it’s nice to leave for the hockey,” he says. Palffy, a Slovak, is adept at English and chooses his words carefully, as he chooses everything carefully when he doesn’t have a stick in his hands.
“But I had to leave Slovakia for the hockey and I didn’t cry.”
He’s not crying as he leaves Long Island, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t spilled milk. Before the ink was dry on the papers on his home, he began getting phone calls from people telling him that he might want to keep the real estate agent’s card.
The calls didn’t come from the Islanders, who had signed him in December after he had held out for 30 games.
“It was really hard for me,” he says of the weeks after he moved into the house, which he intends to keep while renting in Southern California.
“I thought I was signed for the Islanders and they would try to keep me. Then, for two weeks you heard you’d be traded. It’s like nobody wants you. I know I signed a big contract, but they should have told me before so I can be ready for something. But . . . you have to hear about it by reading a newspaper and that’s hard.”
His destination was going to be the Rangers, which was OK. That’s only a short run into Manhattan, then back to Zora and the refuge.
But then it was to the Kings, whose bid of Olli Jokinen, Josh Green and Mathieu Biron was enough to pry Palffy and Bryan Smolinski from New York, which conducted an off-season fire sale and will try to play this season with kids and a bargain-basement $15-million payroll.
The upside is that they will do it without sharing New York newspaper space with an exiled-across-town Palffy.
In the aftermath of the June trade for Palffy has been a summer of adjustment, most of it spent in Slovakia, some of it at the wedding of childhood friend Jozef Stumpel. He and Palffy will play on the top Kings’ line that will probably include Luc Robitaille as well.
“It’s changed my life,” says Palffy. “ . . . I’m trying to forget everything that’s happened in the past, like last year, because last year was really frustrating for me. It was hard. I’ve been trying to figure out everything so I can go forward, I can go to L.A., do my job over there, do what I do best.”
That’s score, something the Kings didn’t do often enough in accounting for more goals than only Montreal and Tampa Bay last season.
He will be with a new team that has a new coach, Andy Murray, who spent part of his summer in Vienna, where he caught up with Palffy and Stumpel. It was Murray’s first visit with them, but hardly his first to Europe, where he coached for eight seasons.
“He was talking about, like, he used to work with European guys,” Palffy says. “ . . . I think he had a very good relationship with European players. That’s good, because sometimes coaches don’t like European players. I think we can work together, European players, Canadians.”
Between bites of schnitzel, Murray outlined Palffy’s role with the Kings.
“Actually, I talked with Ziggy and Jozef together and told them what I expected,” Murray says. “I told them for us to be successful, they have to be successful. And I told them they have to be accountable.”
Says Palffy, “He told me what he wanted me to do, and I know there’s going to be pressure on me. Not only me but on the team because they didn’t make the playoffs last year. They want to play better hockey and put more people in the building. My role? It’s offensive. I want to bring better offense to L.A.”
That’s something he’s more than equipped to do.
Palffy, a slightly built 27, with speed and the hands of a diamond cutter, has had consecutive seasons of 43, 45 and 48 goals, and he had 22 goals in the 50 games he played after the holdout last year.
“He’s an all-star player, a 40-plus-goals guy,” says Smolinski. “He’s one of the premier goal-scorers in hockey, comparable to [the Mighty Ducks’ Teemu] Selanne or [Phoenix’s Keith] Tkachuk.”
He has been a star, though one that flickered because until he retired, Wayne Gretzky owned New York hockey. Ziggy Palffy played in the ‘burbs.
“People define stars,” Palffy says. “They know who’s working hard and who’s not, who’s paying attention to their hockey, who’s trying. They know . . . so they pick their stars.
“I don’t feel like a star. I feel like a regular hockey player. You have to stay on the ground and not jump too high. . . . Not every game is going to go your way.”
But he’s expected to be a star, which is why the Kings got him to play in their new building. And he’s expected to score, which is nothing new.
He isn’t expected to be a one-man show.
“You can’t score by yourself,” he says. “How many can score goals on the team? If you have five or six, that’s good. If only one or two and they expect me to score a goal every game, that’s hard. I don’t think you’re going to score goals that way.”
For all of their scoring deficiencies last season, the Kings did have Robitaille with 39 goals and Donald Audette with 18 in only 49 games after coming over from Buffalo. Glen Murray also can score.
“With the Islanders, Ziggy was always the go-to guy,” says Smolinski. “I’ve scored 30 goals in a season [31 with Boston in 1993-94], but you can’t count me in with 30-goal guys.
“And L.A. has some great players like [Rob] Blake, [Stephane] Fiset and Luc. Ziggy doesn’t have to be the No. 1 go-to guy when you have five or six guys who can score.”
That could make it easier for Palffy to blend in with his new team after his first trade. His motivation is music to a coach’s ears, though it could get him kicked out of the scorer’s union, whose membership is frequently driven by red-light greed.
“If you’re going to win games, nobody going to say who’s going to score goals,” Palffy insists. “If you win, 1-0, I don’t care who scores the goal. It’s nice if you have more players who can score goals. When you have only one or two guys, that’s real pressure. Everybody’s watching you. In L.A., more guys can score goals and that’s nice.”
And essential.
“Maybe he can change some of those one-goal games into wins for us,” Andy Murray says. “But anybody who thinks Ziggy Palffy is going to be a savior is totally out of whack. It’s not like basketball, where one player can come in and turn a team around.
“If Ziggy scores 50 goals and the team plays like I saw last season, it’s not going to make a lot of difference.”
That Palffy is with the Kings is the reward of their yearlong quest. At this time last season, talk was of the need for a scorer, but there was also an oft-spoken opinion by players and management alike that the team would make the playoffs with what it had. The goal was to win a playoff game or two.
Instead, the Kings watched the playoffs on television for the fourth time in five seasons.
Palffy’s streak is longer and it gnaws at him. He has never been in a playoff game, and he’s expected to be a major part of a King playoff team.
“Yeah, I know that,” he says. “I never think before a season how many goals I’m going to score. It’s coming. If something’s inside you, it’s going to happen and you’re going to score 40 goals, 45 goals.
“But it’s better if you score 20 goals and make the playoffs than if you score 40 and don’t make playoffs. I’d be happy to score 20 and make the playoffs.”
It would be a validation of sorts.
“I think it’s just waiting for me, waiting for the right time,” he says. “I’m in the right place right now. The playoffs are waiting for me. . . . This is one of my times right now. I’m changing to a new team. I’m excited, happy, and I want to play hockey right now. I think it’s the right time and the right city.”
It’s almost 3,000 miles from the right house, a castle fit for a King, even if it’s in the wrong kingdom.
