Kings Get Act of Desperation Together

The Kings smelled blood in the second period Friday night and for a change it wasn’t theirs.

Two goals by Yanic Perreault and one each by Rob Blake and Ray Ferraro in a span of 8:37 powered Los Angeles to a 6-3 victory over Washington in a game between desperate teams.

If they played today, it would be another game between desperate teams.

“For us, we can’t be satisfied with just winning one game,” King Coach Larry Robinson said. “I think the players said it themselves: We’ve got to win these next two games on the road trip.

“As desperate as this team was tonight, we’ve got to play another desperate team tomorrow night [at Buffalo].”

There are degrees of desperation, and the Sabres aren’t even in the same realm as the Kings and Washington, which is 1-5-1 in its last seven games with a team that made the Stanley Cup finals last season.

The Kings ended a four-game losing streak, largely on the strength of their first four-goal period since March 10, when they did it against Phoenix. Actually, they have had a fair bit of trouble mounting one-goal periods this season, and this bit of largess was fashioned by some people who haven’t been doing much lately.

* Perreault hadn’t scored since Jan. 2, a drought of eight games.

* Ferraro, who also had a goal in the first period, hadn’t played since Jan. 5, undergoing an operation to repair cartilage damage in the interim.

* Goalie Stephane Fiset faced 30 shots in the first two periods and turned back all of them, some of the saves ranking about 9.9 on the acrobatics scale. Five of them came on one Washington power play, three of those in a 10-second span.

In all, Fiset faced 41 shots and it wasn’t until the third period, when the Kings were trying something new--playing keep-away with a six-goal lead--that the Capitals broke through, with Sergei Gonchar and Jan Bulis scoring on power plays and Peter Bondra on the first penalty shot the Kings have faced this season.

It was a shot generated by the Kings’ Mattias Norstrom, who found himself sitting on the puck in the crease in front of Fiset.

“[Referee Richard Trottier] said you can’t freeze the puck in the crease,” Norstrom said. “I had no idea where the puck was. He said, ‘It’s under you.’ It was a weird call.”

And one he could smile about because it came with the Kings holding a 6-2 lead.

The key goal was Blake’s, which came at 4:46 of the second period when he one-timed a pass from Steve Duchesne on a power play. It gave the Kings a 2-0 lead, eased some of the pressure on Fiset and opened the floodgates against Washington goalie Olaf Kolzig.

In rapid fashion, Ferraro tipped in a shot by Blake, and Perreault scored twice in 66 seconds. The first goal by Perreault came on a rebound of a shot by Luc Robitaille that hit the post; the second after four passes between the blue line and the Washington goal, Robitaille making the final exchange.

That came at 13:23, and for all the lack of defense in front of him, Kolzig was made the scapegoat, departing in favor of backup goalie Rick Tabaracci and being booed off the ice by most of the MCI Center crowd of 18,965.

Ferraro was ebullient about the evening’s events after scoring on his first shift, taking a pass from Craig Johnson--himself coming back after a four-game, injury-generated hiatus--and bowling over Kolzig in doing it.

“I really don’t know how it went in,” said Ferraro, who had been playing the best hockey of his four seasons with the Kings before being injured. “I thought Donald Audette scored it.

“I was really hoping that I could jump back in the game. I’ve got to tell you that I’m pretty happy about this.”

So are the Kings, but their happiness was tempered by a quick trip to Buffalo and another desperate effort in their quest to right a season gone wrong.