A Fitting Start for King Newcomer

One number kept jumping out from the draft boards this summer: 1987. It’s the year 23 of the 30 first-round NHL picks, the No. 1 pick in baseball and the Lakers’ highest draft choice in a dozen years were born. I’ll be taking a periodic look at some members of these 17- and 18-year-olds throughout the coming season. First up: the Kings’ Anze Kopitar.

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The extraordinary thing about Anze Kopitar is how he seems like your typical American teenager.

When he arrived at LAX last week, he whipped out his cellphone and started chatting. It wasn’t long after Lee Callans, the Kings’ hockey operations administrator, picked him up that Kopitar started asking about the Lakers. He really wanted to meet one of them.

And that’s when the difference kicked in.

Kopitar wouldn’t mind saying hi to Kobe Bryant -- “Sure, it would be nice,” Kopitar said -- but he’s really hoping to spend some time with Sasha Vujacic. Vujacic is from Slovenia, as is Kopitar.

With blond hair and blue jeans, Kopitar looks as if he should grab a surfboard and head to Huntington Beach. His English is excellent, thanks to years of study in school, supplemented by tutoring from his grandfather, a former teacher, and watching Slovenian-subtitled episodes of “Friends” and “Scrubs.”

You’d hardly know that this is his first trip to America. This probably won’t be a very long stay, but eventually the Kings expect him to be here, thrilling the crowds at Staples Center for a long time.

He went through rookie camp in San Jose last week, has been in training camp with the full team since Tuesday and Coach Andy Murray says he will use Kopitar in exhibition games. The plan coming in was for Kopitar to return to Sweden but the Kings are so pleased with his play thus far that they’d like him to stay -- though the teenager is in no rush.

“This year, maybe I’m not physically and mentally ready yet,” Kopitar said.

It’s amazing that he can show so much patience with his dream nearly at hand. When he was 5, his grandmother reminded him recently, he told her he would play in the NHL one day.

“It was my dream,” Kopitar said. “Every kid has a dream.”

It was almost inevitable that Kopitar would play hockey at some level. His father played and now coaches, and when Kopitar was 4, he built him a rink outside the family home in Jesenice.

Last year, Kopitar scored 28 goals in 30 games in the Swedish junior hockey league and was good enough to play five games with the big boys in the Swedish Elite League, even though he was only 17.

He impressed the Kings’ European scouts and wowed General Manager Dave Taylor at the world championships, so the Kings made Kopitar the first European player chosen in the 2005 draft when they selected him with the 11th pick.

“For a young man who just turned 18 [in August], he’s got great hockey sense,” Taylor said. “Very good hands, good size and ability. His skating is solid. The only thing I believe he needs right now is a little more physical maturity.”

It’s amazing how much the Kings and other NHL franchises invest in players so young.

“It’s not an exact science,” Taylor said. “We’re trying to project those players when they’re 22, 23, 24 years old. Some of the top players, kids like [Sidney] Crosby or Mario Lemieuex or [Wayne] Gretzky, you know right away. But that’s the rare players.

“Most of the time, the pick is based on a projection. You see something in a player, whether he’s got great skating ability, very competitive ... those are the tools that we look for.”

Murray loves that Kopitar is a coach’s son. That doesn’t mean Murray, who’s clearly excited to coach again after the NHL’s 310-day lockout, will go easy on the kid.

“You’ve got to hold him accountable and make sure he does things right,” Murray said. “Players in this camp, I’m on them about the littlest thing, how they’re wearing their ties and stuff like that. Once they’ve played for us and they’ve scored 40 goals for us, then I’ll back off them. But at this point he’s got to follow the same guidelines as every other player. We’ve got to be demanding, but we’ve got to make sure he knows how to do things, not just tell him.”

Sometimes Kopitar is too eager to please. When Murray calls the players in, the last one back must skate a lap around the ice. On a punitive lap last week, Kopitar came in too fast, tumbled when he tried to stop and wiped out a couple of teammates.

The Kings are pleasantly surprised, though, by Kopitar’s emotional maturity, how comfortable he is in a new country 6,000 miles from home.

He got over his separation anxiety last year, when he lived in his own apartment in Sweden. Even though his mother ran a restaurant, Kopitar never learned to cook. So he ate his meals at restaurants that had sponsorship tie-ins with the team.

“Last year, the first couple of weeks were really hard for me to be away from home and my family,” Kopitar said. “Then I realized I didn’t really have any other options. Just to get used to it. I think I managed that pretty good.”

That’s one fewer thing to worry about when Kopitar stays here for good. His American experiences already include an up-close look at Angelina Jolie and some time in a solitary confinement cell.

OK, it hasn’t been that dramatic a stay: He went to a wax museum, then toured the old prison on Alcatraz Island when the team took a bus trip to San Francisco last week.

My favorite moment was when the team bus passed the 49ers’ home stadium at Candlestick Park, and I tried to explain how popular pro football is in the United States.

“Bigger than hockey?” he asked.

Those kids and their crazy questions.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Adande, go to latimes.com/adande.