Smolinski Finds a Place to Re-Energize the Kings

Bryan Smolinski didn’t take being moved to the fourth line as a demotion.

“I’ve got two real good players there,” the Kings’ center said. He went out Wednesday night and showed just how good they are.

His goal broke a 1-1 tie with 45 seconds played in the second period and linemate Nelson Emerson’s goal later in the period added to the lead in the Kings’ 6-2 victory over the Mighty Ducks before an announced 18,118 at a sold-out Staples Center.

On a night when the Kings played their best game of the season, the Ducks played their worst, putting only 18 shots on goal and only nine in the first two periods.

Smolinski scored when he picked off a pass at the Duck blue line, skated in and backhanded a pass to Emerson, who fired it back toward the net. There, Smolinski was lurking on goalie Dominic Roussel’s right.

Smolinski’s shot was made easier by Buchberger, who had placed himself in Roussel’s face, shielding yet another defender.

It was Smolinski’s second goal of the season, his first since being moved from the second to the fourth line a week ago.

Or was that second to first? In Coach Andy Murray’s nomenclature, frequently the last shall be first, and it certainly was on Wednesday night.

Emerson scored 2:48 later when he took a backhanded pass from Buchberger and blasted away from the right point to make it 3-1.

Buchberger’s presence was something new for the line, because he generally plays on a unit that includes Bob Corkum and Ian Laperriere.

On this evening, Stu Grimson subbed on that line with the general intent of bringing down any Duck in his vicinity.

It became 4-1 at 8:43 when Steve Reinprecht scored his third goal in the past four games, controlling the rebound of a Rob Blake shot that glanced off Glen Murray, who drew an inadvertent assist.

Oddly, perhaps, Reinprecht was the fourth-line center until swapping jobs with Smolinski.

“The way ‘Rhino’ has been playing, he deserves to be with guys like [Murray and Luc Robitaille],” Smolinski said.

The three-goal flurry spelled the end of the evening for Roussel, who was replaced by Guy Hebert in attempt to stop the bleeding.

It took the edge off the Kings’ first period, a chippy 20 minutes in which they limited the Ducks to three shots, but one of them--actually, the first--found the net behind Jamie Storr.

The Kings had taken a 1-0 lead--they have in nine of their 11 games--when Jozef Stumpel scored after Robitaille tipped him the puck. Ziggy Palffy started things with a shot that Robitaille deflected through the legs of Duck defenseman Jason Marshall and onto Stumpel’s stick, for the easiest goal he has scored in a while.

It was a power-play goal, scored when the Kings had a five-on-three advantage courtesy of sins detected against Matt Cullen and Niclas Havelid.

Paul Kariya negated that lead at 11:44 when he took a pass from Havelid and headed into open ice, leaving the Kings’ Mattias Norstrom in his tracks. Storr came out to challenge and could only wave at Kariya’s blast from the left wing.

The Ducks had trouble finding shots. They had one shot on goal in the first half of the second.

They went 6:19 into the third before earning their first shot of that period, which by then gave them only 10.

Before Jim Cummins could launch that shot, Blake had made it 5-1 with his second of two shots following a blue-line blast by Reinprecht. The goal came only 1:26 into the third period and was largely the result of the Kings turning the evening into a feeding frenzy, refusing to let up.

A shot by Palffy and another by Norstrom, on a breakaway upon his escaping the penalty box, rang off the post in the third as the assault continued.

Midway through the third period, the Kings had 30 shots and the Ducks 10. The Kings’ 31st was a goal by Glen Murray, scored on a blast between Hebert’s legs after Robitaille had wrestled the puck from Marshall behind the Duck net.

A consolation-prize goal by Steve Rucchin on a power play late in the period completed the scoring.

In the end, three King lines had goals, Coach Andy Murray’s intent when he scrambled the lineup after a 7-1 loss at St. Louis a week ago.

And in the end, the Ducks lost their second in a row.