Kings Make It Too Easy for Coyotes

Two weeks ago, Robert Esche won perhaps the ugliest game of his life, beating the Kings at Staples Center.

But Esche’s win Saturday night was a thing of beauty, though it was helped along by some King ugliness.

Two weeks ago, King goalie Jamie Storr was run off the Staples Center ice by the Coyotes.

On Saturday night, “you can’t lay this on Jamie,” King Coach Andy Murray said.

Goals by Travis Green, Jeremy Roenick and Wyatt Smith gave Phoenix a 3-1 win before an announced crowd of 14,116 that watched the Coyotes’ unbeaten string run to eight games (6-0-2), their best stretch since making the trek from Winnipeg to Arizona.

This time, though, they did it the easy way.

They were outshot in each of the first seven, but not so on a night when they stifled the Kings, the NHL’s highest-scoring team. The Kings earned only 18 shots, many of them the kind that Esche could have stopped in a rocking chair.

A couple, though, weren’t.

“Don’t think there wasn’t some praying going on in the goal crease, I’m not going to lie to you,” said Esche, referring to stops of blasts by Rob Blake and Lubomir Visnovsky on the final of four futile King power plays, in the third period when Phoenix was protecting a 2-1 lead.

When Esche won, 6-5, at Staples Center on Oct. 15, he faced 35 shots.

“We really didn’t want to do that again,” he said. “There were a lot of problems the first time I played them. There were some things I had to work out.”

One of the things was beyond his control. The Coyotes kept the Kings bottled up for 40 minutes after a first-period lapse.

The Kings had a lot to do with that.

“It was tough for me to tell,” Murray said when asked to appraise Esche’s game. “I didn’t like the way we played tonight.

“We didn’t win any battles. We didn’t compete very hard.”

The Kings didn’t win pucks in the corners, didn’t handle the Coyote forecheck and made bad decisions when there were decisions to be made.

Phoenix, which had won at Dallas a night earlier, didn’t play like a team on short sleep.

Again, the Kings had a lot to do with that.

“We didn’t make them play tired,” Murray said.

Actually the Kings did for almost 20 minutes.

They took their usual 1-0 lead--they have held one in 10 of their 12 games, though they have won only five. The advantage came at 7:08 of the opening period when Visnovsky scored his first NHL goal.

He trailed the play when Ziggy Palffy took a shot that rang off the post behind Esche, then put the rebound away.

The goal stood until Blake fired a shot that went wide of the Coyote goal and banged hard off the solid boards at America West Arena, skittering all the way around to the blue line, where the Coyotes’ Green had said “goodbye” to the pack and gathered it up.

Green sailed in alone on Storr, with Palffy trying desperately to catch up. Green’s shot from the faceoff circle to Storr’s left went between his legs to tie it, 1-1, at 18:28.

It was Storr’s lone faux pas in the opening two periods. He stood strong in handling a shot by Keith Tkachuk in the opening period that had the advantage of dimming light--and provoked a stoppage until somebody could find the switch--and from closer in by Green and Shane Doan in the second.

But there was no offensive help for the league’s highest-scoring team. The Kings earned only 11 shots in the opening two periods, only four in the second, and skated uphill all night.

Palffy, who has 16 points in the Kings’ 12 games, didn’t have a shot. Nor did Luc Robitaille. Nor Mathieu Schneider. Nor Steve Reinprecht, who had three goals in his previous four games.

Glen Murray had one, as did Bryan Smolinski.

“We didn’t handle their forecheck, and we tried to make too many fancy plays in the neutral zone,” said Robitaille, who hasn’t scored in six games.

“They’re a good team.”

They played one that played badly on Saturday night.