Kings Upset Red Wings

King assistant coach Jay Leach tells this story about Ian Laperriere:

“I asked him how he’s about to play hard night after night, always play hard. And he said, ‘Jay, if I don’t, I’m back in Canada, working for General Motors.’ ”

Don’t figure Laperriere for the assembly line soon. Not after his goal at 12:24 of the second period Tuesday night gave the Kings the lead for good in a 4-2 victory over Detroit.

“Not bad for a guy who hasn’t scored in three months, is it?” said Laperriere, laughing about only his second goal of the season.

It came when Luc Robitaille won a race to a puck in the corner and sent it toward the middle of the ice, where it glanced off Glen Murray’s stick to Laperriere.

“I waited, picked my spot,” said Laperriere, again laughing. “No, I just shot and Glen Murray went to the net. It helps when somebody goes to the net.”

And when you hit the other guys. The Kings pounded Detroit all game long.

“That’s the kind of thing we can build on,” said Coach Larry Robinson, back after missing the last two games to attend his mother’s funeral in Canada.

“Everybody has written us off, written off our whole season. But the season’s not over.”

No, 17 games remain, and the Kings remain seven points behind San Jose--a 4-2 winner over Phoenix--for the eighth and final playoff spot in the Western Conference race.

But they won Tuesday after losing to Calgary and Nashville, eminently beatable teams, in lackadaisical fashion.

The Kings got unlikely goals from Laperriere, Doug Bodger and Russ Courtnall, and one from a familiar source, Rob Blake, against Detroit, a team they had no business beating.

Detroit had a man advantage for four minutes in the third period, but the Kings held the Red Wings without a shot, delighting the 13,741 assembled at the Great Western Forum.

The Kings have vanquished the Red Wings twice in the last three weeks. That’s Detroit, twice-defending Stanley Cup champion.

Go figure.

They got a first-period goal from Blake, who wound up from a stride inside the blue line and banged one in off the cross bar for a 1-0 lead; and from Bodger, who scored his second goal and second in as many games, on a shot from the point.

The Kings surrendered a last-minute goal to Igor Larionov to carry a tenuous 2-1 lead at the first intermission, ordinarily a momentum-killer in the Forum.

They saw that lead disappear early in the second when Vyacheslav Kozlov picked the puck off Blake’s stick, slid it to Nicklas Lidstrom, who passed it to Larionov for a breakaway goal, scored short-handed at 6:51.

They won puck after puck, and picked off a last-minute goal when Courtnall fired it into a net that had been vacated by Detroit’s Chris Osgood for an extra attacker.

“We can’t worry about Nashville and Calgary,” Robinson said. “We’ve got to think about Vancouver.”

That’s on Saturday night, and the question before the house is which Kings’ team will show up?