Olczyk in New Role as Star of King Victory

Ed Olczyk wasn’t a key player in the New York Rangers’ 1994 Stanley Cup triumph, having been shunted aside by Coach Mike Keenan. “My role in New York was a piece of dirt on the ground,” he said, “but my role off the ice was very good.”

Through his struggles there, and through a drought with the Kings this season, Olczyk kept his teammates’ respect by raising their spirits with his locker-room banter. On Tuesday night, he boosted the Kings’ morale and their sagging power play, scoring the go-ahead goal in a 5-2 victory over the Toronto Maple Leafs before a crowd of 15,489 at Maple Leaf Gardens.

With Toronto defenseman Jamie Macoun serving a penalty for needlessly hooking Craig Johnson as Johnson raced to touch the puck for an icing call, Olczyk lifted the rebound of a shot by Mattias Norstrom over goaltender Felix Potvin at 15:42 of the third period. As the Leafs pressed to pull even, Olczyk stole the puck from defenseman Larry Murphy and set up Ray Ferraro for a back-hander at 18:16 for a 4-2 lead, assuring the Kings (5-6-1) of their first victory after three losses and a tie.

Yanic Perreault scored into an empty net with 14.3 seconds left for his team-leading sixth goal, capping the Kings’ most productive third period of the season. It was also their first triumph in a game they had trailed after two periods: they were 0-5 in games in which they trailed after 40 minutes and last season were 2-32-6 when they trailed after 40 minutes.

Coach Larry Robinson was pleased with his team’s dominance in the third period, as shown in a 19-9 edge in shots. But he was especially happy with the effort by Olczyk, whom the Kings signed as a free agent last summer for his selflessness and his persistence around the net.

“That’s what we got Eddie O for,” Robinson said of Olczyk’s execution on the power-play goal, the Kings’ second in their last 22 tries. “He hasn’t been playing like that all along. For a while we had moved him down where he wasn’t playing on the first three lines, but he responded well.”

Said Olczyk, who has three goals and seven points: “Hockey is a game of emotion and passion and love, to an extent. If I’m not going well, my role is to lead vocally and by example on the ice.”

Ferraro had scored the game’s first goal, at 4:48 of the first period, but Nick Kypreos muscled past Ian Laperriere to tie the game at 16:15. The Leafs (4-6-0) took the lead on a short-handed goal by Mats Sundin, who made a clever move to elude Vitali Yachmenev and fooled Rob Blake with a deke, and they almost extended that lead to 3-1 at 13:25. Sundin took a passout from Doug Gilmour and jabbed the puck past Byron Dafoe, but video replays showed Leaf forward Wendel Clark’s right foot had been in the crease and the goal was waved off by referee Don Koharski.

The Kings didn’t waste that reprieve. They tied the game at 2 when Vladimir Tsyplakov pounced on the long, uncleared rebound of a shot by Brent Grieve at 2:05 of the third period and killed off a Toronto power play before gaining an advantage of their own on Macoun’s unnecessary penalty against Johnson.

“It sure was a bad penalty,” Toronto Coach Mike Murphy said. “Macoun was the obvious scapegoat. But it reflected [the poor play of] everyone in that period. There was no work ethic and no resolve to win the game.”

The Kings, by contrast, wouldn’t let this one slip away. “Down a goal going into the third period, on the road, this was a moral victory as well as two points,” said Dafoe, who faced 29 shots in what must have been a breeze compared to his 55-save performance in a 2-2 tie at Toronto last Oct. 28. “This was an excellent night tonight defensively. There were a couple of breakdowns in the second period, but that was an awesome third period that everyone played.”