Improvement but No Win for the Kings

All of the meetings, all of the pep talks, all of the philosophical discussions and video demonstrations and head-to-heads and heart-to-hearts took the Kings as far as they could.

They didn’t bring a victory. That can only be done on the ice, and it wasn’t Wednesday night when Owen Nolan’s second-period, power-play goal gave San Jose a 2-1 victory.

Still, the Kings played better than they have in a while. They could hardly have played worse than they have the last week, in which there were embarrassing losses to New Jersey, the New York Rangers and Chicago.

“When you’ve played as badly as we’ve played the last three games, there seems to be some sort of penance you’ve got to go through where you play a couple of real solid games before you get your just rewards,” Coach Andy Murray said. “Tonight, we . . . played the kind of game we needed to play to be successful. But we didn’t get our reward.”

Instead, they got a dose of San Jose’s Steve Shields, who stopped 32 shots, some of them seemingly at his feet.

“Sometimes you play pretty good but you run into a hot goalie,” said Shields’ counterpart, Stephane Fiset, who was hotter than he has been lately, stopping 19 shots.

With Shields, San Jose ended its three-game losing streak.

The loss was the Kings’ fourth in a row, a season high, or low, depending on your point of view, and the end isn’t in sight. Late in December, they are seeking the 1,000th victory in franchise history, and increasingly it seems that it might not come until the trauma of Y2K is in the archives.

Nolan’s goal, his 26th of the season, came at 8:51 of the second period. It was his league-leading 12th power-play score, and it was scored when Vincent Damphousse took a puck behind the King net and to the left of Fiset, circled to a right wing position and sent it to Nolan, who was loitering alone.

Nolan beat Fiset stickside to make it 2-1.

It could have been worse. Ten minutes later, a rebound shot by Niklas Sundstrom triggered the goal’s red light and the building’s foghorn that signaled a two-goal lead. But referee Rob Shick waved his arms to indicate such celebration was premature, and that Fiset had kept the goal out of the net.

Perhaps the various confidence-coaching ploys worked early enough, because the Kings survived the first period, after surrendering 13 goals combined in their last three first periods.

They gave up a goal, scored by Damphousse, who was operating behind a Jeff Friesen pick that was as effective as anything put up by Shaquille O’Neal.

But the Kings matched that with Bryan Smolinski’s putback of a shot by Glen Murray at 18:57.

“It was a big boost for us,” said Fiset of the 1-1 tie after 20 minutes.

Said Andy Murray: “We talked between the periods of being in a position to win the game.”

It was a far different position than they have been in lately.

They ended the first period and began the second on a power play and got four of Rob Blake’s nine shots during those two minutes.

It was plain that the return of Jozef Stumpel--who had been out since Nov. 6 because of a sports hernia--made a difference, particularly on the power play.

“I think we were able to move the puck around with Stumpy,” said Luc Robitaille, who joined Stumpel and Ziggy Palffy on the line that led the Kings early in the season. “He holds the puck just a little longer, and it lets you get in position.”

Robitaille and Stumpel had four shots and Palffy one, though the line’s timing was a bit off for much of the evening.

“I felt good,” said Stumpel, who had two hits and two takeaways in testing himself. “I was a little bit nervous at first, but as soon as I hit somebody, I felt comfortable.”

But Shields was equal to all of their attacks.

“Most of their good chances came on the power play,” San Jose Coach Darryl Sutter said.

“The majority of the time, your best penalty kill is your goaltender.”

He was Wednesday night, and he got a fair amount of help from his defense in the third period.

Flush with a 2-1 lead, the Sharks sat on it until it hatched into a victory. They had only three third-period shots in what evolved into a game of keepaway.