He Wants to Come Along for the Ride

Make room on the icewagon. A hockey innocent is climbing aboard.

The Kings are the thing. Blakey is the bomb. Aki is all that. Ziggy is a one-man ice folly. Muzz to Midget to Schmoe, oh, my.

Just Luuuuuuc here. The Kings defeated the San Jose Sharks, 4-1, before a full house at the Superstore Saturday to improve to an NHL-best 33 points.

Excuse the hockey innocent for sounding like he’s been drinking from the Zamboni, but these are giddy times.

He actually spent an afternoon at an ice rink that was not a complete waste of organ music.

He actually understood what the Kings were doing, why they were doing it, and thinks there is maybe a chance they can keep getting it done.

When is the last time anybody around here has seen a hat trick like that?

Hold that icewagon, you with the gold Dionne sweater and black Gretzky cap and seven conjugations per curse word. Company’s coming.

“To play like this in front of a sellout crowd, you couldn’t ask for anything better,” Donald Audette said after his line contributed to three of the four King goals against one of their Pacific Division rivals.

Audette, 5 feet 8, is known by some as Midget.

He scored the go-ahead goal late in the second period on passes from linemates Glen Murray (Muzz) and Bryan Smolinski (Schmoe).

Muzz faked one defender, flicked the puck between another’s legs to Schmoe in front of the goal, who laid it out for Midget.

Earlier, Muzz scored the first goal of the game on passes from, among others, Schmoe.

Finally, Muzz scored the Kings’ third goal on passes from Midget and Schmoe.

A Three Stooges routine, except it’s the other guys who are getting poked in the eye.

Since the Kings have been without first-line stars Luc Robitaille and Jozef Stumpel, this second line has led the team to a 5-4-1-1 record.

Their basic nicknames are indicative of their attitude, which is shared by others on a team that in no way resembles the ego-bloated and distracted groups of the recent past.

“What you see is what you get,” said Smolinski, acquired this summer from the New York Islanders with star Ziggy Palffy. “I’m not flashy. I’m not rah-rah. The other two guys are the same. We can’t get by with the moves like Ziggy. But we can do anything.”

An organization that has essentially done nothing in six winters suddenly believes the same thing.

The Kings have yet to lose more than two games in a row. They have yet to lose in 12 games when leading entering the third period.

These things might indicate a new attitude fostered by a new coach.

All Andy Murray will say is, “It’s only 25 games.”

And, “The team is just taking me along for the ride.”

But Murray, a former NHL assistant and World Cup coach who arrived last summer from a Minnesota high school, is clearly the one turning the key.

Even before the thing is out of the garage.

Usually during warmups, teams will skate out in a semi-formal line and take casual shots at their goalie before casually skating back to the line.

On Saturday, to get the attention of a group that had lost three of its last four games, he ordered the Kings to take serious shots, stop hard, then turn around and hustle to the back of the line.

“Glen Murray was kind of laughing at the idea,” Andy Murray said. “So I told him, he was in charge of making sure everybody did it.”

This sort of elementary approach is nothing new.

Before leaving their Superstore dressing room, the players pass a giant photo of the Stanley Cup trophy accompanied by the words, “Champions don’t just happen. They are created from within.”

Spread across the top of nearby walls are other similar sayings. As if the Kings weren’t already prepared to go out and pound the bejabbers out of that snooty prep school across town, on another wall is a huge black chart listing eight tenets of “the standard.”

These include, among other things, “We play hard for the full 60 minutes” and “We will stay on the positive side of our emotions.”

Sometimes this seems less like a pro team then a small-town high school, and that Andy Murray is actually Gene Hackman.

Sometimes it seems that if he can get away with this approach for six hard months, it will truly be a miracle on ice.

But then sometimes it seems as if nothing else would work as well.

Saturday was one of those times.

“Under Andy we have direction, we know our roles, everybody is communicating and working together,” Glen Murray said.

Before Saturday’s game, Andy Murray gathered Muzz, Midget and Schmoe together for a little talk. He wanted to let them know that until both scoring stars return, the second line had to control the room.

Only he didn’t quite say it like that.

“I told them that they were a little bit like my wife,” Andy Murray said. “I can’t always live with her, but I can’t live without her.”

Three hours later, the romance was back, 18,118 fans were on their feet, the Kings were on top of the league, and the icewagon was gassed up and waiting.

Me first, me first.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.