Barrie Is King for a Day

All the folks were in from Victoria, about a two-hour ferry ride away, and from various towns around British Columbia for the Barrie family reunion.

The host was most gracious for the Friday night finale. Len Barrie treated his guests, who seemed to number about half of the announced 15,006, to his first goal since Jan. 6 and started the Kings to a 5-2 victory over the Vancouver Canucks.

By game’s end, Barrie had been joined in the goal-scoring column by Craig Johnson and Glen Murray and twice by Jozef Stumpel.

It was an expensive evening for Barrie.

“I had to buy 23 tickets, and some friends bought more,” he said of providing for his own rooting section. “A family dinner [Thursday] night, and calls all day while I was trying to rest. I’m glad I was able to score.”

The victory gave the Kings four on this seven-game trip through four time zones that ends tonight at San Jose, and it tightened their hold on the sixth spot in the Western Conference standings.

They have 70 points--one more than they accumulated all last season--with 21 games to play.

It also made a prophet of Coach Andy Murray, who outlined all the possibilities in his morning quiz. Why, queried Prof. Murray, are the numbers four, 13 and five significant?

The answers--discerned by at least some players--were:

* Four, the number of victories on the trip a win Friday night would bring;

* 13, the number of points the Canucks could be put behind the Kings in the West, which amounts to a burial at this point in the season;

* Five, the number of points the Kings could go ahead of San Jose, eighth in the West.

“And we can make that seven [tonight],” Murray said.

Beating the Canucks, who were shy about a quarter of their roster because of injuries, also helped because the game was the first of four the Kings have against them in the fast-dwindling season.

“We realize that to make the playoffs, we’re going to have to win some of those games,” Murray said.

Friday night’s win was deceptively easy. Vancouver pressed early, outshooting the Kings, 5-3, and getting serious scoring chances from Mattias Ohlund and Trent Klatt that strained King goalie Stephane Fiset, but the Canucks did little more until the third period.

The Kings then took over. Bob Corkum took a puck that the Canucks’ Todd Bertuzzi turned over in the neutral zone, fed Barrie on the left wing and Barrie, finding no one to receive a pass, shot from about 40 feet. The puck hit goalie Felix Potvin’s stick before settling in the net for a 1-0 lead, and finally, 17:35 into the game, the Kings were off to the races.

Then, with only five seconds to play in the period, Craig Johnson beat the Canucks’ Murray Baron to a rebound of Jason Blake’s shot and the Kings had a 2-0 lead.

“The first goal came on a bad turnover,” Vancouver Coach Marc Crawford said. “The second goal was a killer. Obviously, we didn’t recup[erate] from them, because we gave up two more quick goals.”

They came at 23 seconds and 3:19 of the second period from Stumpel.

On the first, he raked in a rebound of his own shot. On the second, Stumpel converted a pass from Mattias Norstrom, who had two assists.

Luc Robitaille’s assist on Stumpel’s first goal gave him points in 12 consecutive games.

There remained only the issue of Fiset’s second shutout of the season, but Vancouver’s Ed Jovanovski took care of that with a goal at 14:19 of the third period; and Klatt added a power-play goal 40 seconds later to make the Kings--who by then were down a defenseman when Garry Galley suffered a strained neck early in the third period--exert a bit more energy.

Another power play with 2:57 to play kept the pressure on, but Fiset handled a shot and gave Bertuzzi a whack with his stick in the crease to mitigate the man disadvantage. Glen Murray’s short-handed goal into an empty net ended the power play and the scoring.

The victory was the Kings’ seventh in their last nine games, their ninth in their last 12, and it sent the Barrie family and friends off into the rainy night after a happy reunion, and Len Barrie off to San Jose to finally get some rest.