Public Skating

There wasn’t a surface area in their Roseville home that Mikey Anderson and his brother Joey couldn’t turn into a makeshift hockey arena.

“We played everywhere,” recalled Mikey, now 26 and playing in NHL barns with the Los Angeles Kings. “My dad built our little patio in the backyard into a rink, and then as we got bigger it slowly grew to be pretty much our full yard. We’d get the full boards and everything – it was a really good setup.

“And then in the summer sometimes we’d leave them up for yard hockey, or there was street hockey, garage hockey, knee hockey – a whole mix of hockey where we were playing and in our heads, we were winning the state championship or the Stanley Cup.”

The brothers kept it fun but competitive. Just 11 months apart, the duo pushed each other. Teammates and friends one minute, 1-on-1 battles turned brawls the next. According to Mikey what stuck out most to him about their “typical brother backyard play” was the unstructured learning they were doing in the process.

The freedom to police themselves in the games and small-area battles. To be creative and navigate the game with their own vision and hockey IQ – a trait that helps Mikey excel at the NHL level today.

“Growing up, I wasn’t the fastest kid, so I had to try and have something, and I could always think really well,” said Mikey, who is entering his sixth season on the blue line with the Kings after being drafted in the fourth round in 2017. “My dad says it probably starts from the backyard rink because Joey always had the puck so I never could get it. I had to try and think of ways to stop him or find a way to get it and still win."

It wasn’t always hockey in the Anderson household. Baseball, tennis, golf – you name it the family embraced it, thanks to some due diligence from mom and dad at the end of every hockey season.

“My mom would take our skates and hide our gear for at least two months every summer,” said Mikey. “Looking back at it now, we learned so many other skills from playing those different sports and making up games on the fly. Just getting outside and being a kid and not being so gung-ho on being just a hockey player. It lets you enjoy different aspects of life.” 

And those breaks never deterred Mikey from reaching the pinnacle of his career. Mikey joined his brother Joey at the University of Minnesota Duluth and won back-to-back national titles in 2018 and 2019 before turning pro after the 2019 win. Since then, Mikey has asserted himself as one of the Kings pillar defenseman, signing a lucrative and well-earned eight-year contract in 2023. Through 352 career games he has 65 assists and 83 points and is a plus-72 in his career. Last season he took his game to another level in the absence of Drew Doughty, who missed the season with injury.

“I had more responsibility, more ice time and was put into different situations I maybe wouldn’t otherwise be put in,” said Mikey. “But it was good. I got to play a little bit more free. I got to play a little more creative, and I think it was a good step forward for me.”

 And where did he learn to truly enjoy that creativity? You guessed it: as a kid at home.

“The game sometimes now gets a little bit too structured,” said Mikey. “So that creativity part, where you don’t have a coach around and it’s just you and your buddies, you try things you would never try at a normal practice or game, whether or not it works it’s something that you can keep doing and help grow that skill or just have fun with it. It’s really important for kids to have that time where there’s not a coach around. Everyone today is working with skills coaches nonstop and not that that’s the worst thing, but sometimes you need to really just have that free time with your buddies.”