Kings at a Loss in Detroit

The officials’ postgame pizza was on time, but it was cold before Steven Walkom, Greg Devorski and Francois Gagnon got to it Friday night.

The snack waited while King Coach Andy Murray and his boss, Dave Taylor, talked to Walkom about a couple of calls in the Kings’ 3-1 loss to Detroit.

It was a calm conversation, Murray said of 20 minutes spent in the officials’ dressing room in Joe Louis Arena.

“I just calmly went in and asked for an interpretation of the last call,” Murray said. “I don’t question that Glen Murray should have been given a penalty. I just asked the referee why [the Red Wings’] Pat Verbeek didn’t get one too.”

At the end of the conversation, there was satisfaction, Murray said.

“One of the linesmen said, ‘Verbeek deserved a penalty,’ ” Murray said. “One of the linesmen said [to Walkom], ‘You missed the call.’ . . . He agreed with me.”

Satisfaction is where you find it. Or maybe how you find it.

“I told him, ‘Many of the calls [in a game] are retaliatory,’ ” said Devorski, a lineman who will, with Gagnon, handle the Kings’ game tonight at Montreal. “I was speaking in a generic sense.

“He interpreted it as me saying Verbeek should have had a penalty, which I did not say.”

To reconstruct, the Kings, who were without injured defenseman Rob Blake, winger Ziggy Palffy, center Jozef Stumpel and goalie Stephane Fiset, trailed, 2-1, with 4:53 to play when Glen Murray was called for slashing Verbeek.

Detroit’s Vyacheslav Kozlov then scored a power-play goal to finish the Kings, who were playing the first game of a four-game trip.

That was followed by Glen Murray’s 10-minute misconduct penalty for berating Walkom.

The coach figured that Verbeek had brought on the penalty by hitting Murray, then Bryan Smolinski, then Murray again. Somewhere in this, Verbeek should have been called for a penalty, Andy Murray told Walkom.

More specifically, Murray was upset because the Kings’ chances at a comeback were thwarted.

“With four minutes left in the game and both teams playing hard, let them decide it,” Murray said he told the officials.

The game was actually decided in the second period when Smolinski’s stick hit the puck after it was fired off the stick of Steve Yzerman and deflected it past King goalie Jamie Storr.

The play came only 47 seconds after Glen Murray had scored a power-play goal past Detroit’s Manny Legace.

Smolinski said he was trying to knock down Yzerman’s shot, but instead knocked it into the net.

From there, it was a matter of protecting the lead, something Detroit does well, particularly before 19,983 in its building.

“That comes from playing great defense,” said Legace, who won his second game in a row after being called up from Manitoba of the International Hockey League. The two victories tied the success he had in 13 decisions with the Kings last season.

The Red Wings took a 1-0 lead when Yzerman rebounded Storr’s rejection of Niklas Lidstrom’s shot only 3:27 into the game.

The Kings started slowly, with only seven first-period shots, none of which challenged Legace, but they did pick up the defensive pace to keep things close.

That also put them in position to tie the score on Murray’s goal.

Yzerman’s second goal broke the tie, and Kozlov’s goal broke the Kings’ spirits and sent Murray to the officials’ dressing room.

“I don’t yell and scream at the referee,” Murray said. “Obviously that’s the way I’m going to stay. . . . I don’t know if we got any satisfaction, but maybe we made him feel bad.”

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COLORADO 2, DUCKS 1

Anaheim’s trouble on power play continues as Patrick Roy wins his 423rd game. Page 4