Past, Future: Nice Present

It was the first night . . . and the last.

In their first home game of the season, on their last opening night at the Great Western Forum, the Kings got a look at a bit of their future in rookie winger Josh Green and their past in his linemate, veteran winger Luc Robitaille.

In the end, the past made the difference.

Robitaille sent most of a sellout crowd of 16,005 home happy Friday when he scored on a slap shot from just over the blue line at 2:47 of overtime for a 2-1 victory over the Boston Bruins.

The shot followed a clearing pass from defenseman Rob Blake.

“I just tried to put it in the corner,” said Robitaille of his second goal of the season. “I was more concerned with setting the play up, but then I saw that everybody was on his off hand.”

Actually, everybody was still trying to get turned around. The Bruins had just failed on a scoring chance when Don Sweeney’s pass toward Sergei Samsonov was errant.

“If Sweeney’s pass had gone on Samsonov’s stick, maybe it’s a different game,” Boston Coach Pat Burns said. “But the play turned around.”

And Blake found Robitaille, who found the net.

Next season’s home opener will be in the Staples Center, but the Forum finale featured Green’s first NHL goal, matched by a shot by Antti Laaksonen.

The tie was fashioned after Boston, largely dormant offensively for more than 36 minutes became more animated near the end of the second period. The seemingly hibernating Bruins had been outshot, 16-7, until then.

Laaksonen’s goal, also his first in the NHL, punctuated a momentum-grabbing series that began when Jason Allison was taken down in open ice by the Kings’ Philippe Boucher, keeping Stephane Fiset’s shutout alive.

Suddenly awakened, the Bruins kept the pressure on, tying the score, 1-1, on Laaksonen’s goal, which came on a 20-footer, shortly after Boston had won a faceoff.

That tie very nearly became 2-1 Bruin lead when Jason Allison had an open-net back-handed shot available until the Kings’ Steve Duchesne barged into the goal, drawing a delay-of-game penalty.

On a night of lasts, there were a number of firsts, many of them involving Green, who changed his number from 47 to 21 to try to change his luck and it might well have worked.

Then again, it might have just been a case of seized opportunity.

Green skated on the second line in the season’s first two games, at least until the Kings went on the power play, when he was supplanted by Sandy Moger. The reason given is that Moger is a right-handed shot, and his presence served to balance the left-handed sticks of Yanic Perreault and Robitaille on the power-play line.

But Moger was twice detected in the crease on apparent power-play goals on Monday at Vancouver, and Green retained his position with the Perreault line, skating the second shift of the first King power play.

Briefly.

Green, who acknowledges that his value lies in his size, and that he plays best when he plays close, planted his 6-foot-4, 212-pound self near the net and batted a rebound of Doug Bodger’s shot past the Bruins’ Byron Dafoe to give the Kings a 1-0 lead at 10:50 of the first period.

“I like it on the power play, and that’s where I’ve scored a lot of my goals in the past,” Green said. “And I like setting up close. It’s probably the first time this season I’ve been allowed to.”

He was largely unhindered on the play.

Green’s goal broke Dafoe’s shutout streak at 162 minutes 19 seconds, and it came on Green’s first NHL shot. Bodger had let fly from near the blue line, with Robitaille also getting an assist.

The Kings got a little help in the second period when an apparent goal by Boston’s Rob DiMaio was waved off when video goal judge John Pemberton detected Chris Taylor’s left skate in the crease in front of Fiset.

Taylor had set up close to the net, then wheeled left to get around Blake only to find himself prematurely in the crease.

In the end, it was a win, but nothing King Coach Larry Robinson wanted to hang in a gallery.

“We’ll take the two points,” he said. But “we’ve got to work harder. An example of how work helps is in that other room. [Boston] doesn’t have a lot of superstars in there. But they probably deserved a better fate tonight.”

Instead, the Bruins lost to the Kings for only the second time in 10 games. And the last time on opening night in the Forum.

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J.A. ADANDE

Were the Kings celebrating the dawn of a new era or the beginning of the end? Page 8