Kings find their groove in time to rout the Sharks, 4-0

From San Jose

Going from famine to feast in the space of two periods, the Kings on Monday turned San Jose goaltender Antti Niemi’s budding masterpiece into a paint-by-numbers picture left out in the rain.

Trevor Lewis and Marco Sturm scored on the Kings’ 31st and 32nd shots and Dustin Brown scored twice in the third period -- the second time after capturing a puck flipped high in the air to him by Anze Kopitar -- to lead the Kings to a 4-0 victory at HP Pavilion and their first sweep of a back-to-back sequence in six tries this season.

“We cracked them in the end,” Kopitar said, a neat and truthful summation.

The Kings, who soundly defeated the Ducks on Sunday, played with great energy Monday and consistently supported Jonathan Quick’s 24-save performance. Quick earned his fourth shutout this season and second in three starts as the Kings won for the fifth time in six games and ended the Sharks’ four-game winning streak.

“You can’t really say enough about the way the team played,” Quick said after reducing his goals-against average to 1.86 -- second in the NHL -- and raising his save percentage to .932, third-best. “San Jose is one of the top teams in the league and really we brought our ‘A’ game. We played well and we didn’t give them much defensively and we scored some big goals.

“Niemi played very well for them. He kept them in there the two periods. But we did a good job of not getting frustrated and sticking to what we were doing right and we got the bounces in the third.”

Niemi, who earned all 16 victories during the Chicago Blackhawks’ Stanley Cup run last spring but was let go after a salary arbitration victory made him too costly, made 30 stops over the first two periods. The Kings might have gotten frustrated. Instead, they persisted.

Lewis scored at 2:08 after Brad Richardson won the puck in a scrum along the boards and passed to the rookie center in the slot. After that came the deluge.

“We got that first goal and maybe broke his will a little bit,” Brown said.

Sturm, a former Shark, scored his first goal as a King at 3:19, taking a pass from Kopitar and sending a knuckler through Niemi’s pads to make it 2-0. But the Kings never let up, which Kopitar called a sign of growth. “We got the goal right after. And a few goals actually right after,” he said.

“That’s where you step on their throat and put them right away. That’s what good teams do -- not taking any chances of them coming back.”

Brown eluded Joe Pavelski to rifle home the rebound of a shot by Drew Doughty at 6:49. He took the team lead in goals with his 16th when he caught up to a long lead pass Kopitar had lofted in the air and controlled the bouncing puck before slicing on the backhand past Niemi at the 18-minute mark, while the teams were skating four on four.

Brown and Kopitar had tried the play before but never with such success. “Tonight we were both on the same page with that flip,” Brown said.

It was quite a different page and story from the Kings’ last visit here, a 6-3 loss on Nov. 15.

It wasn’t a pleasant change for Sharks Coach Todd McLellan.

“I didn’t expect us to be perfect, but I expected us to be a lot more competitive and I expected us to stick to more of a team-type game,” he said. “We turned into individuals when it didn’t go our way, and they picked us apart.”

Kings Coach Terry Murray had little to criticize except a slight letdown in the second period. Otherwise, it was a good start and even better finish. A work of art, even.

helene.elliott@latimes.com

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