Audette Answers Kings’ Call in 3-2 Win Over Blackhawks

The call was for an ugly win, a bad victory, if such a thing exists. Something to erase from the mind the idea that fate is against you.

One you might throw back, if you weren’t so desperate.

If you hadn’t lost six of your last seven games.

If you hadn’t returned from a 1-3 trip to the East.

So when Donald Audette scored his second goal of the game Thursday night to give the Kings a 3-2 win, nobody complained that it wasn’t exactly a Santa Monica sunset.

The Kings and Chicago competed at turning Thursday’s game into graffiti, the Kings giving up a goal on a penalty kill faux pas that gave Coach Larry Robinson a few more gray hairs; and on a shot off goalie Stephane Fiset’s stick.

Chicago countered by directing a shot by Steve Duchesne into the Blackhawk goal.

The Kings set the tone before an announced 11,737 by giving up the game’s first goal on the game’s first power play.

Not that Chicago did anything particularly powerful in scoring it.

Russ Courtnall intercepted the puck in his zone on the penalty kill, but instead killed the Kings when he chose to put on a stick-handling clinic instead of clearing, even though he had several opportunities to send the puck to the other end of the ice.

Courtnall, working backward from the blue line, jiggled the puck through the legs of Chicago’s Chad Kilger, then lost it to Todd White, sprawling on the ice in doing so.

White merely flipped it back to Kilger, who popped it past Fiset for a 1-0 lead.

The Kings were 2-20-1 when the opposition scores first, and had lost their last 19 such games.

“You can get over-statisticed,” Robinson said. “If it’s in the back of your mind when you’re playing, you’re at a huge disadvantage.”

Scratch one disadvantage. Another streak is broken.

This, after all, is Chicago, with the worst record in the West. The Kings had dominated the series before Thursday, outscoring the Blackhawks, 9-1, in two victories.

And so it seemed only right that they came back, with Duchesne getting his third goal of the season on a shot from near the blue line. Duchesne got more than a little help when Chicago’s Reid Simpson tangled with the Kings’ Vladimir Tsyplakov in front of the net. Simpson’s stick lagged behind enough to tip the puck past his goalie, Jocelyn Thibault.

The Kings held a 2-1 lead after Audette beat Thibault on a shot at 5:12 of the second period, countered by Kilger’s second goal of the game, which came when he beat the Kings’ Olli Jokinen for the puck behind the King goal, moved to Fiset’s left and sent a shot off Fiset’s stick and into the net.

Duchesne assisted on both of Audette’s goals, in addition to scoring one himself.

The Blackhawks were just what the Kings ordered after a bleak couple of weeks. Not that anybody would acknowledge it.

“You can’t take anybody for granted anymore,” Robinson said.

True enough, but the Kings have 18 victories and three of them have come against Chicago.

“Still, it’s hard for us to be positive,” defenseman Rob Blake said. “It’s hard to be positive when you’ve lost seven out of eight games.”

Maybe, but there is ground to make up in the standings, with a matchup against San Jose on Saturday.

“We can’t think that far into the season now,” Blake said. “We’ve got to set our goal to win the next game, then work ahead. We can’t be thinking five, 10, 20 games down the line.”

No, but they got the one they wanted Thursday night.

An ugly victory over Chicago in an ugly game.

That looked beautiful to them.