He Won’t Grovel About Pavel

While the Kings are outside the velvet rope of the playoff club, hoping the bouncer will see them and let them in, while they’re struggling to put pucks in the net and fans in the seats, Pavel Bure goes down to Florida and starts scoring as if he’s trying to beat an expiration date.

Bure is a man who would have been a King--if the Kings had thrown together the right trade package and followed it up with the right contract offer.

He told the Vancouver Canucks he’d never play for them again, prompting them to hold a season-long trade search that ended when he went to the Panthers on Jan. 17, along with defensemen Bret Hedican and Brad Ference, for center Dave Gagner, goalie Kevin Weekes, forward Mike Brown and defenseman Ed Jovanovski.

Bure, who was home in Russia while he waited for the Canucks to find him a new team, stepped on a plane, laced up the skates and had scored six goals before he even realized what time zone he was in.

So didn’t King General Manager Dave Taylor feel some pings of regret when he saw the highlight shows?

“Not really,” Taylor said. “We tried hard in that deal. There was nothing there that made sense to us, as far as a hockey deal is concerned. Most players, shortly after a trade, come in and play well. The key to any trade is to evaluate it after time.”

Which is why I believe Taylor isn’t staying up nights envisioning Bure in a Kings’ uniform. It’s only a matter of time before Bure reverts to his old ways and concentrates on the only agenda he has ever pursued: his own.

Bure revealed his nature in 1997, when the Canucks signed Mark Messier as a free agent. Bure popped off, saying he wanted to be traded before the season started. There’s no way Bure can be about winning if his response to adding the greatest hockey winner of this era to his team is to ask out.

A year and a half later, he finally got his wish.

In the short term, this is going to look bad for the Kings because Bure could have been doing the same things here that he’s doing in Florida. And, man, do the Kings need that.

Only five teams in the NHL have scored fewer goals than the 122 put on the board by the Kings. They need some type of spark to make up the four-point deficit in the standings to San Jose, which currently occupies the eighth and final playoff spot in the Western Conference. They also need someone to inspire fans to step up and buy those expensive seats in the new Staples Center next season.

Bure has two 60-goal seasons on his resume, scored 51 goals last year and is one of the most exciting players in the NHL.

Eventually, however, Bure would be doing the same type of things here that he did in Vancouver. When he wasn’t bickering with management and staging protests over money, he accused management of planting stories that he was bickering with them over money.

Fans who wrote in to the Vancouver Sun after the trade last month called Bure a “petulant ingrate,” a “selfish little whiner” and a “petulant little whiner.” I think I detect some kind of theme here.

One thing the Kings have going for them now is chemistry. Unfortunately, chemistry doesn’t necessarily get you goals. But goal-scorers don’t necessarily get you victories, or Paul Kariya and Teemu Selanne would have the Mighty Ducks in first place.

And if Bure poisons the atmosphere in the locker room, it might undo all the good he does on the ice.

He isn’t even a proven winner. Since he led the Canucks within a game of the Stanley Cup in 1994, they haven’t been close. There had been more attention paid to Pavel’s soap opera than the team itself.

And there’s no guarantee he would help at the box office. Attendance in Vancouver actually slipped his first three seasons there, and that’s in a town that loves hockey.

At some point it has to be about character. Sports sure make it easy to look the other way as long as a guy is scoring goals or catching touchdown passes or hitting home runs. What about when that stops?

That’s why Derek Harper is a better addition to the Lakers than Dennis Rodman would be, even though Rodman is a more effective player. The problem with Rodman has nothing to do with what color he dyes his hair or how he decides to get married. It has to do with helping those around him improve their skills, not distracting them by picking up technical fouls or getting kicked out of games.

It’s the same reason I wouldn’t want Latrell Sprewell on my team. It’s not because he choked his coach, an overblown incident that was similar to what has happened before and will happen again. It’s because he was a bad influence on Chris Webber and Joe Smith when they played with him at Golden State and never exhibited the true qualities of a winner.

Bure just signed a five-year, $47.5-million deal in Florida and now that he has his money he should be happy.

There’s no way to guarantee the Kings such happiness. But at least they’ll have peace.