Kings Have a Bleak-Tie Affair

If every regular season game is a matter of extreme importance, as Coach Andy Murray preaches, then Wednesday night’s home opener against the St. Louis Blues qualified as a full-fledged nightmare, a sign of bad things to come.

It looked a lot like a microcosm of last season: pretty good for a while, but not much to show when it counted.

The Kings managed to blow a four-goal lead in the third period, resulting in a 4-4 tie that felt every bit like a loss.

“It’s tough because we really played well and we just seemed to panic,” Luc Robitaille said. “We didn’t get the puck out when we were supposed to. We didn’t make the plays we were supposed to.”

When the Kings’ attitude is that these aren’t “only” regular season games, the downside is it can make these types of games even more difficult to absorb.

“We take an attitude that the next game is the most important that we play,” Murray said early in the day. “We’ve just tried to take that kind of approach to it.

“I just think that we don’t have the luxury of looking too far down the road. We’re not one of those teams that can say, ‘We’ll get it going. We’ll find the groove. We know that we’ll get our points and we’ll have them by the end of the year.’

“I think there’s a reason to win every game. That’s your responsibility as a coach, to come up with a special reason to win every game.”

Sometimes that means reaching deep into drawer of tricks. Before the Kings took on the expansion Columbus Blue Jackets, Murray was adamant that the Blue Jackets would not record the first victory in franchise history against them.

Wednesday night, with the Blues visiting Staples Center, Murray asserted before, “We’re just as tough as them. We’ve got to be just as gritty.”

It was tough to take much out of their 7-1 drubbing of Columbus. That team is so far away from being competitive, so desperate for building blocks that after the loss Columbus Coach Dave King actually said: “One of the positives about the game is that we didn’t lose close.”

It’s a different story with St. Louis, the defending President’s Trophy winners. This team has the look of a group determined to win the Stanley Cup, the look of a James Bond movie villain intent on world domination.

For the first two periods it was ideal. Jamie Storr stopped two point-blank shots, the Kings survived an early St. Louis attack and the Kings started going after Blues goalie Roman Turek.

They were efficient on their power plays, scoring four seconds into their first power play and 15 seconds into a two-man advantage.

Their third goal looked like a passing clinic, concluding when Ziggy Palffy slid the puck to Robitaille for a clean shot. The duo looked a lot like Paul Kariya and Teemu Selanne on the play, and that’s pretty flattering.

Right wing Kelly Buchberger induced St. Louis defenseman Chris Pronger into an attack that resulted in Pronger serving a two-minute instigator penalty, a five-minute major for fighting and a 10-minute misconduct penalty.

That put the league’s reigning Hart Trophy and Norris Trophy winner on the shelf.

And it takes something that extreme to keep Pronger out of the game. That guy spends more time on the ice than Michelle Kwan in an Olympic year. He played 9 1/2 minutes in the first period alone.

The Kings capitalized on his absence, but they couldn’t make good on the big lead.

They can take a lesson from the way St. Louis didn’t tank, despite trailing, 4-0, at the end of a four-game, week-long trip to the West Coast.

The Blues were more determined to get the puck in the third period. The Kings acted as if they didn’t want the puck. Sometimes it appeared as if they didn’t even know where it was.

The Blues must have remembered the time they trailed, 3-0, to the Kings in the third period of Game 3 of their 1998 playoff series and rallied to score four goals during a five-minute major penalty on the Kings.

The next set of playoffs seems as far in the future as that game was in the past. For now, the Kings have to keep trudging through the regular season.

As challenging as it will be for Murray to conjure up new incentives for each game, it might be even more difficult to keep his players believing in them. It’s simply impossible for athletes, no matter how competitive they are, to maintain their intensity for an 82-game schedule. Sooner or later they’ll run across a January day in Ottawa when they just don’t have it, and that can’t be treated as the end of the world.

The Kings clearly bought into Murray’s message last season, when they posted a 39-31-12-4 record. And they’re demonstrating an eagerness to win in the early parts of this season, as evidenced by their strong starts even in their loss to Buffalo and in Wednesday night’s game.

But they have to be concerned about the way they get soft and satisfied with their leads.

Another issue is going to be the Staples Center ice, which was a problem last season and looked rough in its season debut Wednesday. It appeared that Palffy lost control of a bouncy puck at the last second as he tried to shoot a backhand past Turek on an overtime breakaway.

Perhaps the Kings should get used to it. They want to get to the same level as the Blues, and it doesn’t appear that the path will be smooth.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at his e-mail address: ja.adande@latimes.com.