Robitaille Goal Is a Winner

The question before the house was will pucks be in use at practice in Chicago today?

The Kings showed up Wednesday night at Joe Louis Arena and, predictably, fell behind two-time defending Stanley Cup champion Detroit.

But they rallied with third-period goals by Donald Audette and Rob Blake, then won, 3-2, on an overtime goal by Luc Robitaille that was highlight-film material.

That’s Joffrey Ballet highlight-film material.

Robitaille was spinning and falling when he swept the puck around his body, and out of the reach of Red Wing goalie Chris Osgood.

“It was one of those plays where they got caught out of position in front of the net,” Robitaille said. “It was a two-on-one with me and Donald [Audette] . . . and it nicked [defenseman Jamie Macoun’s] stick. It got behind me and I just turned around and got good wood on it and it went in.

“I wanted the roof [the top of the net] with that shot.”

He laughed, because he knew he would have earned style points just for getting the puck in the same area code as the net.

It was a postscript to a Tuesday from hell that followed a Monday night game in St. Louis in which the Kings played miserably in a 5-1 loss. Their first morning in Detroit was spent practicing without the puck--just skating wind sprints.

The message was work during the game or work at practice.

Message received.

“[Assistant Rick Green] made the joke, ‘another skating practice tomorrow?’ ” King Coach Larry Robinson said. “I think in this instance the guys knew they didn’t play well [at St. Louis]. It was unfortunate that you had to do that, but the bottom line is that they proved to themselves that when you work, at least you have a chance to win.”

The Kings outshot Detroit, 40-26.They fell behind, 2-0, to a first-period goal by Brendan Shanahan and a second-period score by Sergei Fedorov, but refused to fold. The Kings were 4-24-1 when their opponents scored first.

“But even when we were down, 2-0, they didn’t stray from the game plan, and that was what was so pleasing to us as coaches,” Robinson said. “They trusted that we had a game plan and stayed with it.”

The plan was to be conservative: Avoid taking chances and seize what opportunities availed themselves. Nothing cosmic about that, but all too often such strategies have been difficult for them to implement.

“When you get down 2-0 and you’re not getting anything creative, [the] first thing you do is you start to panic and take a lot of chances,” Robinson said. “When you take chances against [Steve] Yzerman and Fedorov and guys like that, you’re just saying, ‘C’mon, open the gates. . . .’ You can’t do that against good teams.”

Instead, the Kings opened the gates for themselves in the third period when Ian Laperriere spied a free puck in the neutral zone and sent it sliding toward Audette, who had eluded Detroit defenseman Larry Murphy. Audette skated in alone on Osgood to cut the Red Wing edge to 2-1 at 7:06.

Only 29 seconds later, Rob Blake tied the score when he pounded a shot off Osgood’s glove from just inside the blue line.

In overtime, Igor Larionov--whose eight-game scoring streak ended--compounded his misery by hauling down Robitaille and drawing a holding penalty with 1:02 gone.

“In that situation, I was trying to prevent the guy from going in on a breakaway,” Larionov said.

What he did was give the Kings their first power play since the opening period and only their second of the game.

Only 55 seconds into the power play, the Kings had a win, their first on a six-game trip that has begun 1-1-1.