A Lucky Guy : Robitaille Is in Playoffs and Away From the Traffic and Hockey Torment of L.A.

Behind Luc Robitaille’s home is a placid blue pond, where he spends long, lazy hours fishing with his son, Steven.

Their idyllic hideaway in suburban Pittsburgh is a 20-minute drive from the Civic Arena, where the Penguins play and practice, and he doesn’t have to fight freeway traffic to get there. It is to that home he will bring the son he and his wife, Stacy, expect in about a month.

If you have all that, who needs the hassles of Los Angeles?

“I never went to the beach, anyway,” Robitaille said. “I like it here. I’m close to downtown, but it’s real country. It’s safe, and the schools are good. For that, we couldn’t have asked for anything better.”

The trade he did not ask for has turned out well. He plays for a team that wants him and a coach, Ed Johnston, who communicates with him. His teammates made him feel comfortable immediately. None has played a part in getting him traded, as he implied Wayne Gretzky did when the Kings sent him to Pittsburgh last July for Rick Tocchet, a longtime Gretzky pal.

Best of all for Robitaille, he still has a chance to win the Stanley Cup this year. The Kings do not. One might think that would give him pleasure, but he said he bears no grudge.

“To be honest, I don’t really care that they didn’t make the playoffs,” he said. “I can’t say I didn’t watch the games--I’ve got that new (satellite) dish--but somewhere down deep inside, you’re a professional and you can’t lie. You have pride and you want to say, ‘Maybe I am happy,’ but the real truth is I don’t care. All I care about is what I can do here to make this team win.”

The trade hurt him less than the events that preceded it.

Although the Kings reached the 1993 finals, then-coach Barry Melrose demanded they be rebuilt to emphasize brawn instead of finesse.

Melrose, who had made Robitaille the team captain when Gretzky was injured, distanced himself, no longer consulting Robitaille and other key players. Gretzky gained greater influence in personnel decisions, and owner Bruce McNall, who had promised Robitaille he would never be traded, had less clout because his shaky finances forced him to sell his majority interest in the club.

Robitaille never mentioned Gretzky at his farewell news conference, but he clearly believed Gretzky was behind the move. Like other players, he had heard that Gretzky had weeks before told Tocchet, “We’re going to get you.”

“Players should play and managers should manage,” Robitaille said a day after the trade. “I never spoke out about that. . . . I just think it should be that way. In Pittsburgh, players are worried about playing and that’s it.

“It’s kind of weird that decisions would be made sometimes before people know it. It’s a weird situation, what’s going on in Los Angeles, and maybe it’s going to be for the better, maybe it won’t be. Maybe one of the reasons that I’m going is because I didn’t agree with that.”

Gretzky has acknowledged that he advises the front office on trades when asked, but says that he does not make trades. Both Tocchet and King General Manager Sam McMaster said Gretzky was not involved in the decision to trade Robitaille.

Ten months later, Robitaille won’t elaborate. Nor does he retract his statements.

“Looking back now, I think it was time for me to go,” he said. “There comes a time in your career when you might as well go--when people don’t appreciate what you do, especially when you feel management doesn’t want you. They wanted to trade me. It wasn’t me (who wanted out).

“I’m not bitter toward anybody. People asked me why I got traded, and I told them what I thought was the truth. I wasn’t bitter then and I feel the same now. It’s a choice you make in life. You make the choice to be a professional hockey player and you know there’s a chance you might get traded, and I did.”

He said he and Gretzky were friendly in the locker room, though they never socialized. He rejected the theory that Gretzky was jealous of his popularity among King fans, who responded to him on a more emotional level than they do to Gretzky.

They admire Gretzky, but they see him as an icon who was bought from Edmonton with cold, hard cash. Robitaille was home-grown. The 171st pick in the 1984 draft, he joined the Kings in 1986 as a baby-faced 20-year-old and molded himself into an all-star left wing who averages 46 goals per season. They watched him grow up, serenading him with chants of “Luuuuc!”

“I don’t think Wayne should be jealous of anybody,” Robitaille said. “He was our captain and our leader, and he was my idol as a kid. The whole time I was in L.A., I feel I don’t owe anybody anything and nobody owes me anything. I think I gave everything I had. I don’t owe anything to Wayne.”

Said Shawn McEachern, another former King who plays for the Penguins: “I never thought Lucky (Robitaille) would get traded. He’s like Jags (Jaromir Jagr) here, only he was there longer and he was the franchise for so long.”

Robitaille began to hear trade rumors last spring, after the Kings missed the playoffs. Cash-flow problems were shrinking the club’s budget, and Robitaille’s $1.8 million salary was a luxury. After he returned from the world championships, he asked McMaster where he stood.

“He told me they weren’t going to trade me, but he said if they got the right deal they would trade me,” Robitaille said, shrugging. “Bruce called me and pretty much the only team he mentioned was Pittsburgh. That was OK. I knew players there, and I knew the owner, Howard Baldwin, and it was a good team that had a chance to win.

“(Melrose) and I, the first year he was there, he treated me great. I gave back everything I had for him. But the next year (1993-94), there were five or six players that for whatever reason, Barry completely changed on them. He thought they couldn’t help him for whatever reason.

“The first game of the second year, he said we weren’t big enough--and we were the same team we were the year before. He benched Mike Donnelly, and Mike Donnelly was one of the guys who played really well in the playoffs. Suddenly, Tony Granato wasn’t big enough to play for him anymore, and he’s probably the guy that plays the biggest of anyone.”

The Penguins were interested in Robitaille because they knew four-time scoring champion Mario Lemieux would miss the season because of back problems and the effects of Hodgkin’s disease treatments. Tocchet was hobbled by a bad back last season and was past 30, but Robitaille was 28 and fit. That made his salary more palatable to the Penguins, who had paid Tocchet $850,000.

Robitaille justified the extra expense by scoring 23 goals in 46 games this season, and helping the Penguins compile a 29-16-3 record, third-best in the NHL.

“We felt Luc could give us the same production Rick had in the past,” General Manager Craig Patrick said. “He’s helped us a lot. He scored some key goals for us and was a big part in our success during the regular season.

“He’s also been very good defensively. I don’t know what the knock on him was in L.A., but he’s killed penalties here and he’s played on the first or second power-play unit all year.”

He initially played on the top line, with center Ron Francis and right wing Jagr. When Kevin Stevens recovered from a broken ankle, Robitaille moved to a line with John Cullen and Joe Mullen and scored only twice in his last 10 games.

Reunited with Francis and Jagr on Monday, he scored two goals as the Penguins rallied for a 5-3 victory over the Washington Capitals and tied their best-of-seven playoff series at 1-1. He scored another goal Wednesday, but the Penguins lost, 6-2, to fall behind, 2-1, in the series going into tonight’s game at Landover, Md.

“If you play with Jags, you have to get open for him (to pass to), because the other teams always have two guys on him,” he said. “But there’s so much talent on this team, it really doesn’t matter who you play with. It doesn’t matter as long as you work hard.”

Although he sold his home in California, he hasn’t cut all his ties to Los Angeles. He’s still a co-owner of Iceoplex, the Kings’ North Hills practice rink, and he keeps in touch with Donnelly, Granato and interim assistant coach Dave Taylor. He ran into Alex Zhitnik, Charlie Huddy and Robb Stauber after the Kings traded them to Buffalo for Grant Fuhr, a deal that mystifies him.

“You look back at the year we went to the finals, and (Darryl) Sydor, Zhitnik and (Rob) Blake are the guys who carried us,” he said. “You can’t buy a good young defenseman like that.”

Not winning the Cup for King fans, whose affection “is always going to be special to me, something I’ll never forget,” is his lone regret about his stay.

“I would have loved to win the Stanley Cup in L.A. every year I played,” he said. “We certainly came close (in 1993). Just to bring it to L.A. would have been special. But you’re a professional athlete and life goes on. Now I have to win it here.”