Criticism Has Flames Ablaze, 5-1 : NHL playoffs: Terry Crisp juggles each of his lines, and Calgary cuts Kings’ lead to 3-2.

Hold that funeral. The body has a pulse.

At the very least.

The Calgary Flames, buried under an avalanche of goals by the Kings Tuesday night, and riddled by a vicious attack from the Calgary media Wednesday, came back to life Thursday by beating the Kings, 5-1, to stave off elimination in the opening round of the Stanley Cup playoffs.

The Kings still lead the series, 3-2, after losing at the Olympic Saddledome before 20,166, with Game 6 at the Forum Saturday.

If you believed the local headlines, there would be no Game 6. After the Kings embarrassed the Flames with an NHL playoff record 12 goals Tuesday night, Calgary Coach Terry Crisp became the whipping boy in the papers.

“Crisp Has Got To Go--Now,” blared a headline in the Calgary Herald. There was a choke handkerchief to be clipped out by faithless readers.

“You lose, you get trashed,” Crisp said after getting a little breathing room. “That’s the way it is in the sports world. Coaches get hired one day and you lose, you get fired the next.

“But we have no control over that, so we met as a team and said, let’s go out and do the job.”

Crisp, in his third year and coming off a Stanley Cup-winning season, was criticized for not doing anything as the Kings slapped shot after shot into the net.

No timeouts. No line changes. Nothing.

That criticism was blunted Thursday when he shook up all of his lines.

Theoren Fleury moved onto a line with Joe Nieuwendyk and Gary Robets, replacing Sergei Makarov. Joe Mullen was placed on a line with Paul Ranheim and Joel Otto.

And in the biggest change of all, the Flames scored on a power play.

Calgary’s loss of power on its specialty teams had been the most shocking aspect of the series. Look for clues as to how the Kings, fourth in the Smythe Division, could win three of four games from the Smythe winners and defending Stanley Cup champions, and the power play might be a good place to start.

The Flames had the best power play in the league during the regular season with a 27.7% success rate.

When the Flames missed on their first three tries Thursday, it gave them a string of 22 consecutive misses in this series and a one-for-24 mark overall. That’s just over 4%.

And the one power play goal they got came on a penalty shot.

But they finally broke the string Thursday by going ahead, 1-0, in the first period on a goal by Dana Murzyn. He scored from 45 feet, with goalie Kelly Hrudey screened by both a Flame and a King.

Nieuwendyk put some juice in the power play early in the second period, but it took three shots to pull it off.

The first was a wraparound by Gary Roberts that Hrudey blocked. The puck bounced out to Al MacInnis in the left circle. His shot from there was also blocked by Hrudey.

But again, it bounced away.

In came Nieuwendyk from the right side. He knocked the puck down with his right hand and shoved it past Hrudey with his stick.

The life, the euphoria and the confidence generated in the previous games seemed to go out of the Kings at that point.

“We came out flat,” Todd Elik said. “We should be ready for every game, but something was just missing.”

Rob Blake scored the goal for the Kings on a night they had only 19 shots on goal, nine through the first two periods.

“We passed up good quality shots,” King Coach Tom Webster said. “We were probably overpassing.”

Certainly on the power play. That the Kings were only one for eight in that situation was bad enough. But they managed only a total of three shots on goal on the eight power plays.

The Flames didn’t exactly solve all their power-play problems either, going just one for seven.

Ric Nattress added two goals for the Flames and Roberts got the other.

“It hurts,” Webster said “that we were missing three quality defenseman.”

Tom Laidlaw (lower back injury), Tim Watters (bruised ankle) and Bob Halkidis (sore shoulder) were all back home nursing their ailments.

Defensman Larry Robinson is also hurting today, after taking a blow in the back from Brian MacLellan. He was sore but finished the game.

“If anybody has any pride at all, with all that has been said in the last few days in the media about the players and the coaching staff, you know they’d be more than a little mad and hungry,” Robinson said. “With all the things that were said, they were going right for the jugular. Had (the Flames) all been illiterate, we might have had a chance.”

King Notes

Last Add, Record Dept.: the Kings’ three hat tricks in the 12-4 victory in Game 4 was one fewer than the previous total in team history. The other playoff hat tricks were scored by Marcel Dionne against Boston in 1976, Tom Williams against Chicago in 1977, Butch Goring against Atlanta in 1977 and Chris Kontos against Edmonton last year. . . . The previous playoff scoring high was 10 goals in a 10-8 victory over Edmonton in 1982. The Kings scored a dozen goals once before, in a regular-season 12-1 win over Vancouver in 1984. The five second-period goals in Game 4 tied a mark reached twice before by the Kings, both times in a 1982 playoff series against Edmonton.