Kings slip past Hurricanes in a shootout

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Kings forward Jeff Carter didn’t miss a beat, using his best deadpan delivery.

“I can’t tell you all my secrets,” he said.

Carter had scored the only shootout goal, going forehand to backhand, giving the Kings a 2-1 victory against the Carolina Hurricanes on Friday night at PNC Arena. He is becoming the very definition of a closer, with the decider in back-to-back games, as he won it for the Kings in overtime on Wednesday against Ottawa.

Just don’t ask him about his thought process heading into his shootout approach. The secret to his success will remain his secret, apparently.

Kings goalie Jonathan Quick stopped Jeff Skinner, Alexander Semin and Nathan Gerbe in the shootout, and Hurricanes goalie Cam Ward denied Anze Kopitar before Carter scored.

Players have a love-hate thing going with the shootout. Carter was ambivalent about whether he likes the shootout.

“Yeah, I do. I don’t, sometimes,” Carter said. “It depends if I score or not.”

It was an unusual game, to say the least. There was no scoring until the third period, with just 4 minutes 34 seconds remaining when Kings forward Dwight King took advantage of a miscue by Justin Faulk, who overskated the puck coming off the boards. King pounced and scored, short-handed on a breakaway to make it 1-0.

“I really had no other option besides going to the backhand,” said King, who scored his first goal of the season. “The only thing I did was probably fake high.”

But just like that, Carolina responded 40 seconds later with Skinner’s rebound, on the power play, at 14:06. The Kings had a four-on-three advantage in overtime but could not get a single shot on goal during the power play.

“We got to overtime and get a four-on-three and that should be two points,” Carter said. “That needs a little work. That was ugly.”

Kings Coach Darryl Sutter coached against his son Brett, a center for the Hurricanes, for the first time in the NHL. He did coach his son, briefly, when Brett was a child in Alberta. But it’s a long, long way from the novice division to the NHL.

Father and son chatted after the game in the hallway, but Darryl wasn’t about to indulge in sentimentality about the occasion.

“I just told him [afterward], I never looked at him at all except on faceoffs,” Sutter said.

Brett’s ice time was just under nine minutes, and he won three faceoffs and lost five. There have been so many Sutter versus Sutter games — coaching and playing. And, in fact, Brett is the eighth Sutter to play in the NHL.

“You know what, I kind of get past all that nostalgia stuff,” Darryl Sutter said. “That’s what we do.”

He was more expansive about his conversation with Quick, who faced 28 shots in a decent goaltending duel with Ward.

“He got sharper as it went along,” Sutter said. “He told me coming off the ice that he felt good. That’s important because it’s something [we’re] trying to learn as a team.

“It’s hard to travel like that and not skate. You could see we kind of had to build it as we went. We just didn’t quite have the legs.”

The two points were meaningful considering the Kings traveled cross-country on Thursday. They’ve won two shootout games on the road and an overtime game at home this season. This was the first of four games on the road, and they move on to Florida to play the Panthers on Sunday.

“It’s never easy coming all the way out here,” Carter said. “Gets the confidence going a little bit, start of a trip is always good.”

He was asked whether there was a carry-over effect from the Ottawa game.

“Absolutely. We’re starting to get better with our system game and whatnot,” Carter said. “And, as that gets better, the confidence starts to get going and things start to get a little cleaner, and from there it just kind of rolls.”

lisa.dillman@latimes.com

Twitter: @reallisa