KING AND THE NEW CASTLE

Luc Robitaille doesn’t want the whole Staples Center, downtown’s newest and most expensive playground.

He wants only a piece of it, maybe 10 feet across, 10 or so feet deep. Only about 100 square feet of the 1 million available, and no, it’s not a tax-deductible luxury box.

It has an ice floor, it’s near the goal and it’s quite expensive because it’s usually populated by unfriendly folks with sticks in their hands and “No trespassing” signs in their eyes.

Real estate in Mr. Robitaille’s Neighborhood is costly.

“You know, what Luc Robitaille is good at is that he’ll pay a price to score a goal,” King Coach Andy Murray says. “A lot of guys won’t go into traffic to score those goals. Luc Robitaille will.”

Says Dave Taylor, who played on a line with Robitaille before becoming his boss as the team’s senior vice president and general manager, “He pays the price to score.”

Says Robitaille, “I know I have to pay a price.”

The price was right for seven goals in the Kings’ first five games before he cooled slightly in Canada, where he was shut out Friday at Calgary and Saturday at Edmonton.

His lifetime total has mounted to 524, but goals this season have been more expensive because Robitaille has Ziggy Palffy on his line as the other wing. Last season, while Palffy was still working for the New York Islanders, Robitaille more often toiled on the offensive outside--particularly on the power play--while trying to generate whatever he could. Forays were made to the net, but so were retreats and frequently net work was handled by big bodies who posted up like basketball centers, trying to tip in pucks while enduring a pounding.

It was easier on Robitaille’s body, if not his mind. He generated 39 goals, but the Kings generated 11th place in the Western Conference and only eight places keep playing at season’s end.

Part of the reason was that the power play was powerless, limping along at a 13.1% rate.

Fast-forward to a line with Palffy and a physically sound center in Jozef Stumpel, and Robitaille’s generator has moved. Robitaille compares that line to one involving himself, Wayne Gretzky and Tomas Sandstrom that helped take the Kings to the Stanley Cup finals.

He has scored four of his goals on a King power play that leads the NHL at a nine-for-27 clip, or much more efficient 33.3%. All four of those goals have been scored within arm’s length of the goaltender, three of them at Tampa Bay in a power-play hat trick.

Two of Robitaille’s goals have been scored on rebounds of shots by Rob Blake, retrieved in Mr. Robitaille’s Neighborhood.

“I’ve got to go to the net,” Robitaille says. “I’ve got to get the tough goal.”

It’s because hockey, like life, goes in cycles, and he’s pedaling along with Stumpel and Palffy, guys who can move the puck.

“The difference has to do with who you are playing with,” Robitaille says. “You’ve got to adjust, do what you have to do to work with the players you are with.”

In this case, it means doing the heavy lifting.

“Ziggy is very good on the boards,” Robitaille says. “[Stumpel] is good on the other side, so I’ve got to go to the net. I’ve got to pay a price.”

It wasn’t something he expected when the Kings traded for Palffy, who had made his rep in the Eastern Conference, which the Kings visit only once a season.

“Ziggy can control the game,” Robitaille said. “He’s an amazing passer. All of us are in awe.

“He was from the East and we hadn’t seen him that much. We thought he would come in here and be a scorer and get breakaways. We were surprised at the other things he could do.”

What he could do was make magic with the puck, and with Palffy’s childhood teammate Stumpel waving his wand on the other side of the ice, all kinds of possibilities opened up.

Those possibilities frequently involve Robitaille and proximity to the goal, flashing in to take passes from either for one-time shots, or to rebound their misses. He has become the equivalent of a basketball power forward, looking for open ice, going to the net with the shot.

“He is always up front, always in the right spot,” Stumpel says. “He’s a goal scorer, so he knows where he has to be. Everything is going for him and hopefully it’s going to continue.”

That is the real question. Conventional wisdom says that Palffy, himself a 40-plus goal scorer in three consecutive seasons with the Islanders, and Robitaille might have trouble coexisting on the same line as long as the NHL insists on using one puck at a time.

Once, twin 40-goal scorers were more common. Now they are as rare as a new arena without a luxury box.

But Palffy has two goals and four assists, and with luck could have twice that. The production drop hasn’t happened.

Stumpel says it won’t.

“I don’t think their goals or point production will go down, because they are good players and they are going to get their scoring chances,” he says. “I don’t think they are going to slow down.”

Palffy and Robitaille say they can’t.

“He’s easy to play with because he can score goals,” Palffy says. “That’s important. We know that in three, four shots he’s going to score a goal.”

Says Robitaille, “If I see Ziggy, I’ve got to pass him the puck. He plays great with or without the puck, and I really like playing with him. He really understands us.”

And the Kings are starting to understand him.

“He is looked at as being a finisher, but he gives some great passes,” Murray said of Palffy. “He’s a finisher, but he’s impressed us with his ability to make players around him look good too.”

One of them has been Robitaille, the Kings’ ultimate finisher, and that’s all right with Palffy.

“I don’t care who’s going to score goals because the most important thing is to win games,” Palffy says. “That’s why we’re here, why we’re a team. We win because of a team, not because of one player.

“I grew up [in the Czech Republic] with teams where everybody likes to pass, everybody likes to score. I know it’s nice to score goals. But anybody can score. The idea is to win.”

That the Kings have done in compiling a 4-2-1 record on their season-opening trip. It has Robitaille more excited than his seven goals.

“I play to win,” he says. “If I play to score, nothing happens. I like to play with emotion, and I don’t think I can play that way if I play for myself.”

Emotion won’t be hard to find tonight when the Kings play Boston.

“We’re playing a game in [Staples Center] for the first time,” Robitaille says. “It’s hard to describe it. It’s different. The guys are up.

“We’ve really been pointing for this game. We really want to win this game, to establish ourselves in the building. There [are] going to be 19,000 there and there [have] never been 19,000 for a hockey game in L.A. What did the Forum seat, 16,000? We want them to come back.”

He’s inviting everyone to see Mr. Robitaille in his neighborhood, where goals are scored, bruises are earned and games are won.