Blake’s Trickery Salvages Wild Tie

So much for grandiose plans of a defense rivaling anything the Pentagon could conjure up.

This one couldn’t even protect a two-goal lead.

The offense, though, made up for it.

Almost.

The Kings got third-period goals from Rob Blake and Luc Robitaille to rival the two third-period scores by the New York Rangers’ Jan Hlavac in a 5-5 tie Thursday night at sold-out Staples Center.

Blake’s goal was his third, the first hat trick of his career and a great way to break out of a 13-game scoring slump. He also had two assists for his first five-point game and played the best defense he has shown in a long time.

Defense, for many of the rest of the Kings, was the downfall and the reason they went away unfulfilled, with a point for a tie and diminished euphoria from a two-goal rally that was necessitated by blowing a 3-1 lead.

“We didn’t want to play that open a game,” Blake said. “We should have won the game in the first period. We had the chances with [four] power plays.

“Maybe we can play a couple like that a year, but we can’t win that way.”

They can’t against the Rangers, who scored 12 goals in two games against the Kings, winning one.

Forgive, though, the lack of defense. Well, an announced 18,118 on hand did.

“I don’t know how many fans there were here, but they probably figure they saw a good game,” Blake said.

The two coaches didn’t.

“As a coach, I didn’t like either game,” New York’s Ron Low said, also referring to a 7-6 Ranger victory over the Kings earlier this season.

Added King Coach Andy Murray: “A game like this is tough on coaches.”

But easy on spectators’ eyes.

As picturesque as his three long-range, red-light-illuminating shots was Blake’s final assist, a pass to Robitaille on a power play that tied the game with 5:29 left.

Blake, normally a blaster, became a playmaker when he took the puck from Ziggy Palffy, skated in until the Rangers’ Sylvain Lefebvre committed and then finessed the puck through Lefebvre’s legs and onto Robitaille’s stick.

With Ranger goalie Kirk McLean occupied by a hat trick-scoring defenseman, the net was vacant for one of the easiest of Robitaille’s 568 goals.

It came on a power play and the third King goal with a man advantage.

“He tells me to look at home on plays like that, and sometimes it works,” Robitaille said. “I looked when I was near the net, and the pass was right there.”

For all of that, though, the plot and plan for the Kings was to play the kind of defense that had won them three games in a row before Thursday night.

They held the Rangers to 25 shots, sure, but five of them escaped Stephane Fiset’s grasp, many from behind screens and from in front of the crease, tantalizingly close to the net, just as close to defensemen’s sticks that could have cleared them.

Murray agreed with Blake’s assessment that the game was there to be won in the first period.

“We had a 2-0 lead; had outshot them, 18-5, and they were committing penalties,” Murray said.

Instead of being put away, the Rangers killed off three of the four King power plays in the opening 20 minutes.

The other featured a goal by Palffy that gave the Kings a 1-0 lead for the 21st time this season.

From the first intermission on out, the Rangers were in an offensive mode.

“We deserved a better fate than that,” said Low, whose team had lost five in a row on the road and played their first tie of the season.

After the tie was forged in the third period, there remained King opportunities aplenty, with breakaways by Bryan Smolinski and Eric Belanger in the minute after the Robitaille goal. Each was thwarted by McLean.

And after killing off an overtime-opening power play, the Kings had one final opportunity to win with 25 seconds left when Lubomir Visnovsky scooped up a puck at his own blue line and found nothing but ice in front of him.

Visnovsky skated in alone but put the puck into McLean’s pads for the Kings’ final gasp.

“I would have bet a million dollars Visnovsky scores on that one,” Murray said. “He does it all the time in practice. I thought it would have been 6-5 on that.”

Instead, it was the final play of a game that had people on their feet for most of an evening that the defenses took off.