Making His Point

He was pressing Thursday, and then the pressure came off.

He had a streak going Saturday, and then the streak ended.

The process that began Nov. 5, when Donald Audette drew a line in the snow demanding a trade from Buffalo, is nearly complete. It lacks only him signing the papers for a home near the sand at Manhattan Beach and getting Manon and the kids into it.

The Sabres are nine seasons of history. He has nine games as a King.

“I think it’s safe,” Audette says of his decision to buy rather than rent. “I don’t think they’re going to trade me any time soon, do you?”

The Kings aren’t.

From the day he arrived Dec. 19--hours after his trade for a second-round draft choice--until now, he has been their catalyst and good-luck charm.

“New guy, new guy,” Ray Ferraro yelled, pounding his stick on the ice when Audette came through the gate for the morning skate in St. Louis. “New guy is here. We win now.”

In his facetiousness, Ferraro was prescient.

Audette played the next night, in Chicago, and scored 17 seconds into his first shift. He has three goals and eight points in the nine games since, all the while playing more comfortably, melding with his new teammates and getting in condition.

The Kings are 7-1-1 over that time.

Until Saturday, the Kings were 6-0 when Audette had a point.

He didn’t have one in a 2-1 loss to Phoenix, nor in a 4-2 win over his old team on Thursday, admittedly trying too hard against the Sabres.

“The pressure is off now,” he said, laughing.

The tie came Saturday, when the Kings’ only goal against Edmonton came when Audette had the puck on the right wing and slid it over to Rob Blake, who blasted the shot home on the power play.

They were 8-19-3 when he got to town.

The difference is no surprise to him.

“We had a few teams lined up,” Audette says of negotiations with several, including Chicago and the New York Islanders, held to relieve his rancorous contract situation in Buffalo.

“I chose to come here, because I knew I could help this team. I knew this team had a lot more potential than it showed in the standings. It’s starting to show right now.”

He’s a large part of the reason.

“He’s a point-a-game guy, right?” says assistant coach Jay Leach, who has welcomed Audette to the power-play unit he tutors.

“Even if he doesn’t get a point on a play, you watch him. That power-play goal the other night [scored by Luc Robitaille against Colorado], he made a good play on it. He didn’t get an assist, but he made a play on it.”

Says Coach Larry Robinson: “He brings scoring. I think he also brings up our skill level. We have a bunch of crashers and bangers, but I don’t think we really had a high skill level. He makes our power play better. He does good things with the puck and he’s always around the net. Great hands.”

Those hands generated 24 goals at Buffalo last season, best among the low-scoring, defense-minded Sabres and four fewer than his team-leading 28 goals of the previous season.

The value of those goals was in dispute as last summer began, and that dispute is why Audette is a King.

One with a long memory.

“It was a business move,” he says. “I thought the thing was going to settle down during the summer and it didn’t.

“Then I realized that they weren’t going to sign me, and that’s when I asked to be traded. If I would have signed what they were offering, I think I would have screwed 10-12 [teammates] for next year. That was on my mind. I was fighting for myself, but I was also fighting for principle on the team.”

Negotiations bordered on the bizarre. Buffalo offered $1.4 million for a season, much less than the market value, so Audette asked for $1.2 million. If the Sabres had agreed, he would have been paid slightly under the league average and would have been an unrestricted free agent at the end of the season.

The final offer was three years for $5.7 million, with $2 million and $2.5 million in the final two seasons. But both of those were at the option of the Sabres.

“It didn’t matter if they put $10 million in the third year or $5 million,” Audette says. “They weren’t going to [exercise that option].”

He helped the Sabres into the playoffs the last two seasons, and they made some noise. But the noise was all about Dominik Hasek, merely the best goalie in the world.

“Buffalo doesn’t want to change at all,” Audette says. “They have one guy they rely on to win games and that’s why they pay him eight million bucks. After that, they say, ‘We can get away without paying guys.’ ”

It’s what he came to realize, and the reason that on Nov. 5 he embarked on a one-way mission to put Buffalo in his rear-view mirror. The trade demand was no negotiating ploy.

“I knew I wasn’t going to go back there,” he says. “It’s not burning a bridge. I live by principles. If you believe in what you’re saying and what you’re doing, you can’t go wrong. You can’t look back.

“It was done when I asked to be traded. Even if they had come up with an offer, I wasn’t going back. It wasn’t a move that I was trying to get them to sign me.”

The Kings signed him for two seasons for $3.6 million, after which he becomes an unrestricted free agent. One, he believes, with more gaudy statistics than were put together in Buffalo.

“Every time you play a team in the East, it looks like they’re holding more and trapping more,” he says. “It’s more free-wheeling skating [in the West]. I love that, because I think that’s my game. If I don’t have anybody to hold me back, I can, well, it’s perfect.”

It has been so far, and he has helped it along with a worth ethic that is one of the reasons the Kings traded for him.

“ ‘I’m not coming to L.A. just to be on a vacation,” he says. “I’m here to play hockey.’ ”

For as long as possible.

“I want us to go as far as we can,” he says. “I’ve had some good experiences the last two years in the playoffs, and I’m sure some guys here won the [Stanley] Cup and want to do again . . . I said the first day I was traded, ‘This team is out of the playoffs right now, but they will make it.’ ”

They’re getting closer now, in part because of the new guy, who stood by his principles in Buffalo and made his way to Manhattan Beach.