NHL PLAYOFFS: KINGS vs. OILERS : Kings Looking to Pull a Coup : Game 7 Against Oilers to Settle More Than Series

So it all comes down to this: The seventh game of the best-of-seven series, Kings vs. Oilers in the much-ballyhooed Smythe Division semifinal round.

Winner take all. Loser take the rest of the spring off.

If the Kings win tonight’s game at the Forum, the Wayne Gretzky deal can be called one of the greatest coups of all time. The Kings will have come from a 14th overall finish in the National Hockey League last season to knock off the defending Stanley Cup champions.

Indeed, the future will be now, just as the Kings have been saying all season. And someone will have to coin a phrase reminiscent of “the Miracle on Manchester” that marks the Kings’ come-from-five-goals-behind overtime victory in the third game of a best-of-five series with the Oilers in 1982.

If the Oilers win, they’ll be off and running after their third straight Stanley Cup, glancing back only long enough to scoff at the notion that the lowly Kings thought they could change the fate of a franchise overnight by buying the best player in the game. The Oilers have been trying to show that they are still winners, even without the Great Wayne Gretzky. But they’ll have to beat Gretzky head-on to prove it.

That’s a lot of pressure on both teams.

“This is pressure, but this is the greatest feeling in the world,” Gretzky said after the Kings’ 4-1 victory in Game 6 Thursday night. “Every hockey player wishes he had pressure like this.”

Gretzky thrives on pressure. After all his years with the Oilers, they, too, have a reputation for thriving on pressure.

But while Gretzky was giving his treatise on pressure before the lights and cameras in the Kings’ dressing room, reporters were hard-pressed to find any Oilers willing to face the press on any subject. Mark Messier, the Oiler captain, was dressed and sprinting out of the Northlands Coliseum before most reporters could reach him.

Retreat to fight another day?

The Kings are expecting a battle royal tonight.

“I said all along that this would be a long series, six or seven games,” Gretzky said. “Home ice is important, but we’re still in a tough situation to be in. Of all teams you don’t want to play in Game 7, it’s the defending champions. They know how to play under pressure.”

As the players and coaches look for an advantage, exchange cliches and try to put the pressure on the other side, some facts emerge.

King goalie Kelly Hrudey points out that the Kings have been in a must-win situation their last two times out, needing victories in the fifth and sixth games to stay alive after trailing three games to one. “The difference in this game is that Edmonton is facing elimination also,” Hrudey said.

That desperation can make for some pretty heroic efforts.

Already Mike Allison’s tying goal in Game 6--the goal on which he dragged Oiler defenseman Randy Gregg along the boards behind the Oiler net and scored as he was dumped to the ice, making one last sweeping gesture with his stick to get the puck out front--is being immortalized by the players as the personification of determination.

Allison simply refused to give up.

“It gave us a tremendous lift,” Marty McSorley said. “You can’t help looking up and seeing one-nothing, one-nothing. That goal gave us the lift to open it up a little bit.”

They opened it up enough to score the next three goals and take the Edmonton crowd out of the game.

When the Kings and the Oilers face off in the final game of the series, the Kings will be guarding against Allison-like efforts.

McSorley said: “It seems like so many of their guys have reached out to such a high so many times. We have got to go into the game expecting the best of the Edmonton Oilers. They have so many good players, so many character people, so many big-game players, that we have to go in to this game ready to play the best game of our life.”

King Notes

Tonight’s game will begin at 7:30 and will be televised by Prime Ticket. KLAC (570), KGIL (1260) and KORG (1190) will have the game on radio. . . . Wayne Gretzky leads this series in scoring, even though he has scored just two goals. He has eight assists for a total of 10 points. Chris Kontos leads in goals, with seven (beating the Kings’ club record for goals in a seven-game series set by Marcel Dionne). Gretzky has assisted on four of Kontos’ seven goals. For the Oilers, Mark Messier has one goal and eight assists. . . . Gretzky said, again, after the game at Edmonton Thursday night that the NHL’s playoff procedure needs to be changed back to a system of bracketing teams by conference, not by division, and putting the team with the best record against the team with the eighth best in the first round, No. 2 vs. No. 7, No. 3 vs. No. 6 and No. 4 vs. No. 5. That way an especially strong division like the Smythe Division this year would not have to eliminate one of two teams as strong as the Kings and the Oilers in a first round.

This is the first seventh game the Kings have played at the Forum since their first year in the league, 1967. They lost the game and the series to Minnesota. . . . It’s the first time they’ve played in a seventh game since 1976.