O’Sullivan had time on uneasy chair

If you think you’re having a truly rotten day, well, it could be worse.

You could be Kings forward Patrick O’Sullivan.

O’Sullivan was scheduled for about four to five hours of dental work Monday afternoon to clean up the mess created during Saturday’s game against St. Louis with about two minutes left in the first period.

“I was just chasing after the puck and the defenseman got to it before me and shot it and [it] went directly into my mouth,” said O’Sullivan, who thought that the shot came from defenseman Christian Backman.

“It’s funny. Well, it’s not funny but it’s ironic, almost a year ago to the day I got my other two teeth knocked out” against Colorado.

“Both times I saw it but I just couldn’t move quick enough to do anything about it,” O’Sullivan said. “It’s something about early October that’s not good for my mouth.”

This time, O’Sullivan said he lost three teeth, needed about six stitches and suffered a broken bone below his nose. “These [the teeth] were still in but they were back in my throat almost. It was pretty gross.”

Naturally, this being hockey, O’Sullivan was back by the end of the second period after a quick stint in the Kings’ emergency room. He will be wearing extra facial mask protection for now.

“I’ve got this stupid mask on,” O’Sullivan said. “I don’t want to and I know they’re going to make me wear it for at least two weeks. We’ll see what happens. I don’t like it at all. It’s hard to see with it and it’s hard to breathe too.”

And now to reconstruct Saturday’s third-period collapse . . .

There was extra work being done on the ice at Monday’s practice in El Segundo and usual meetings. And the Kings were saying all the right things in the home-opener aftermath in which they blew a 3-1 lead, giving up four straight goals in a 5-3 loss to the Blues.

“Unacceptable,” O’Sullivan said.

Said defenseman Tom Preissing: “I think it’s just one of those things where we have to learn to be comfortable playing with a lead. In a same breath, if bad things happen, if they get that goal early, we need to be able to recover and we can’t allow what happened to happen. If we want to be a good team, or a playoff team, if you have a two-goal lead going into the third period, the game for all purposes should be over.”

Defenseman Rob Blake sensed trouble even before the final 20 minutes with the team being propped up by the first line of Dustin Brown-Anze Kopitar-Michael Cammalleri and rookie goaltender Jonathan Bernier.

“We didn’t make the game easy. I don’t think we played that well in the first two periods,” Blake said.

“We came out with the lead because of Kopi’s line and because of Bernier. Then in the third, St. Louis applied the pressure and we played pretty much the whole period in our zone.”

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lisa.dillman@latimes.com