A bad back nearly cost the Kings’ Gabe Vilardi his career. Now he’s playing like a star

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.”

A big, sure-handed center in juniors, he wasn’t a great skater, but he got to the net with great success. He was expected to be a key piece of the Kings’ rebuilding process. Instead, his continued back woes stalled his progress and he fell deeper on the organization’s depth chart each year. He seemed on the verge of becoming a bust.

“With all players, you like to project and hope and all that type of stuff. But the number of setbacks he had, you wondered,” coach Todd McLellan said. “But yet, you kept going back to the package and the skill and the talent and the brain and the hands.”

With his back no longer an issue, Vilardi, 23, has synchronized his skill, talent, exceptional ability to read the game and uncanny shooting touch. Now playing on the wing, he has been who the Kings had hoped he’d be when they drafted him: a commanding presence and impact player who brings a strong work ethic.

“To tell you was there ever any doubt, we didn’t know. We do know that every time he played at [minor-league] Ontario he was a dominant player. But at the same…