Kings lose shootout to Wild, 1-0

Reporting from St. Paul, Minn. — If the Kings are to make a serious run at a playoff berth over the final 2½ months of the NHL season, they can’t afford to waste opportunities like the one they had Tuesday.

Because after outplaying Minnesota through the regulation 60 minutes and a five-minute overtime, they came away frustrated nonetheless when Pierre-Marc Bouchard scored the only goal of the night in a shootout to give the Wild a 1-0 win.

The win gave Minnesota 57 points, ninth in the Western Conference, while the Kings, who got only a point by going to overtime, are two points out of a playoff berth with 56 points.

And that could be a point that will come back to haunt the Kings, who hadn’t lost in five previous shootouts this season.

“You want to give yourself every opportunity to win. I thought we did that. We left everything out there,” said Kings Coach Terry Murray, who saw his team’s three-game win streak end. “We’ve got to move on. You’ve got to keep a short-term focus.”

Especially when the long-term view is as daunting as the one facing the Kings. Including Tuesday, the Kings play 24 of their final 32 games against teams they trailed in the standings coming out of the All-Star break. And 12 of those games are on the road, where the Kings have earned more points than only one other Western Conference team.

“When you get later on, you always look back at things that could have been and maybe a point that got away on you,” Murray said. “But right now we’ve just got to get reenergized, refocused.”

Added Jonathan Bernier, who played a spectacular game in goal with 25 saves: “We would have liked those two points. We had our chances. Obviously, when you go to a shootout it can go either way.”

For most of the night everything seemed to be going the right way for Bernier, whose only other career shutout came last March. He nearly lost this one in the opening minute of the second period when Mikko Koivu’s blast from just inside the blue line sailed over his right shoulder, only to strike the crossbar and ricochet away.

“It was kind of a knuckleball. I got lucky there,” Bernier said of the Koivu shot.

His luck ran out in the second round of shootout though when Bouchard, after losing control of the puck at center ice, poked a backhander between Bernier’s legs.

That made a deserving winner of Niklas Backstrom, who stopped 27 shots for the Wild — including one in overtime that he followed by skating out of the net to poke the rebound away from Kings’ sniper Anze Kopitar, preserving his second shutout in his last four starts. And, unlike Bernier, Backstrom’s good fortune continued into the shootout when Jack Johnson, going second for the Kings, deked the goalie to the ice only to have him make a spectacular sprawling kick save with his right foot.

Backstrom then clinched the win with an easy blocker save to thwart Dustin Brown, who skated off pounding his stick on the ice. In the dressing room afterward, Brown, like Murray, found solace in his team’s play despite the frustrating finish.

“We’re neck and neck and everyone’s trying to fight to get into those last few spots. We’ve got to win games,” Brown said. “But we play like that on a consistent basis, we’re going to get our fair share.

“We take a point [and] realize that we played a really good game.”

kevin.baxter@latimes.com