Oilers Freeze Kings, 4-2, Take 3-1 Lead : NHL playoffs: Gretzky plays, but Fuhr is the player who makes the difference with several big saves.

Five minutes before game time Wednesday night, Kings’ team doctor Steve Lombardo gave Wayne Gretzky a shot of xylocaine for his injured left ear.

Gretzky said the injection left the left side of his upper body numb. The condition must have been contagious.

Gretzky’s teammates played as if they were frozen on the ice in the first period, enabling the Edmonton Oilers to race to a 3-1 lead en route to a 4-2 victory in Game 4 of the Smythe Division finals before a Northlands Coliseum crowd of 17,503.

That gives the Oilers a 3-1 lead in the best-of-seven series that resumes Friday night at the Forum.

“We’re certainly not out of it,” King Coach Tom Webster said, “but we have to come up with a better effort. After we dug so deep (in Game 3), to turn around and play one of our worst periods irritates the hell out of me.”

While the first period might be blamed on the Kings’ inability to halt the Oilers’ offensive charge, the second period surely belonged to Edmonton goalie Grant Fuhr, who made one great save after another, showing the form that enabled him to star for Edmonton through four Stanley Cup-winning seasons in the 1980s.

Fuhr missed the first half of this season, suspended by the league for admitted drug abuse. But in this series, he looks as though he has come all the way back.

“I don’t know what you can say about him,” teammate Charlie Huddy said. “He’s been unbelievable, especially in the second period. I think he made four or five huge saves that kept us in the game.

“He’s got confidence right now. The problems that he went through are over and done with. He’s got a point to prove now--that he’s still the best goalie in the NHL. And he’s doing it right now. There’s no doubt about it.”

Does he believe there’s a point to be made?

“I think I’ve got something to prove to myself more than anything,” Fuhr said. “I want to prove to myself that I can be as good as I think I can be.

“The better you play, the better you feel about yourself. I think you just start to find a groove. . . . Once you find it, it’s easy because it’s all reaction and you don’t have to think about it.”

Gretzky didn’t want to have to think about the injury he suffered in Game 3. But it was a little difficult with medication running through his veins and a modified helmet on his head.

Knocked out of Game 3 in the first period when a puck opened a deep laceration in the ear, requiring 25 stitches, Gretzky knew he would need the medication toplay.

“It was the only way,” he said. “The ear was so sore.”

Gretzky said he was still uncomfortable, and the new helmet didn’t help.

“I didn’t like it,” he said. “After you play 13 years with the same helmet. . . . But it was not the time to worry about an injury like this. You’ve just got to play through it, and we didn’t play very well.”

Gretzky contributed two assists, but his nemesis, Esa Tikkanen, noticed a difference.

“I think he was a little scared of getting hit in the head,” Tikkanen said. “I think his ear was bothering him, and today was easier (for me).”

Huddy opened the scoring with his second playoff goal, firing from the slot over goalie Kelly Hrudey’s left glove.

But defenseman Larry Robinson, who scored only one goal in the regular season, equaled that in the playoffs by flicking the puck over Fuhr from the left circle.

Before the opening period was over, however, the Oilers surged to a 3-1 lead by scoring a goals 43 seconds apart.

The first came on a power play. The Oilers missed on their first 15 power plays in this series before scoring on one in Game 3.

Edmonton made it two in a row when Joe Murphy scored his second playoff goal at the 18:40 mark of the first period. The Oilers followed with Martin Gelinas’ third goal of the postseason for a 3-1 lead.

With 30 seconds remaining in the second period, the Kings cut the margin to 3-2 with Steve Duchesne’s fourth postseason goal, the score coming on a power play.

Petr Klima scored the final goal, his fourth of the playoffs, at the start of the third period.

When it was over, Webster remained fixated on the first period.

“We just didn’t show up,” he said. “I’m very disappointed in our performance. You can’t take a period off and expect to turn it around.”

Perhaps the most telling goal of the game was Murphy’s. He skated down the middle unchecked by Tim Watters and beyond the reach of Marty McSorley, who came over too late to impede him.

There was little Hrudey could do by that point.

There was little anybody did in that first period.

So the Kings are faced with the same deficit they encountered two years ago when they won three consecutive games to eliminate the Oilers.

“It’s not a pretty position to be in,” Hrudey said, “but I don’t think a 3-1 lead is insurmountable. We just have to take it shift by shift, period by period.”

Starting with the first period Friday.

King Notes

Edmonton outshot the Kings, 30-28. . . . Steve Kasper returned to the lineup after missing two games with a concussion. But before he met the Oilers, he clashed with television commentator Don Cherry, a former coach. Cherry chided Kasper during the morning skate for sitting out with the injury, then told the King center he was too old to be playing anyway. The two wound up in a shouting match.