Turning Point

The Kings marked the end of their 14-game playoff losing streak Sunday not by putting champagne on ice but by putting ice on aching knees, shoulders and ribs.

“We weren’t rah-rah,” center Bryan Smolinski said. “Everyone was icing down. All series this time of year, the team that doesn’t have bumps and bruises isn’t working hard.”

The Kings worked hard to earn the 2-1 victory narrowing the Detroit Red Wings’ series lead to 2-1. The Kings initiated contact, killed off seven manpower disadvantages and gave Detroit center Sergei Fedorov little room for his puckhandling magic.

“For them, it’s got to be a big boost and give them confidence,” Detroit winger Kirk Maltby said Tuesday. “Any time a team has confidence it can be dangerous. They played fairly physical in Detroit, but like a lot of teams, when you come home and you have the fans behind you, you pick it up.”

A fine effort, certainly. But will it be a detour on the way to another early playoff exit, or the beginning of the Kings’ climb toward parity with elite teams such as the Red Wings and Colorado Avalanche?

The answer will be evident tonight, when the best-of-seven series resumes at Staples Center.

“If we lose [today], Sunday’s game doesn’t mean anything,” Ian Laperriere said. “We have to get back even in this series.

“We’re in a good mood but not too confident. We didn’t accomplish anything. We won one game. Big deal. That’s how I look at it. We have to be ready to go hard [today] because they will, and they have a lot of depth.”

Center Jozef Stumpel, who scored the winner Sunday, has additional reason to be nervous because his wife, Martina, is expecting the couple’s first child any day. But, like his teammates, Stumpel is calm and ready to pay the same steep price the Kings paid Sunday.

“We have to do it again because we don’t have any choice,” he said. “We have to be ready. If we don’t do it, we might find ourselves pretty soon out of the playoffs.”

Said Smolinski: “You don’t want to be too high. I’d say even keel describes our mood. We want to continue what we did [Sunday]. How we respond is up to us. You can say you’re ready and you can get pounded. That’s what happened in the first two games. We can’t get comfortable.”

Not that the Red Wings will allow them to relax.

As the oldest playoff team, with an average age over 30, the Red Wings could have been expected to suffer more playing back-to-back games and facing off Sunday at what their body clocks thought was 11:30 p.m. EDT. And although they won Game 2 without forwards Steve Yzerman (injured ankle) and Brendan Shanahan (fractured foot bone), they might have been excused for having an emotional letdown Sunday when the loss of such vital players set in.

Yet, they gave the Kings all they could handle, equalizing Luc Robitaille’s goal at 8:21 of the second period with a goal by Nicklas Lidstrom at 18:02 and applying pressure in the third period, only to be thwarted by goalie Felix Potvin.

“They played well in Game 3 and they’ve got to be feeling a little bit confident now,” veteran Red Wing defenseman Larry Murphy said of the Kings. “It’s going to be a struggle. There’s no way of getting around that. . . .

“I think we can play a little bit better with the puck and create more and try to get a little more flow. But I anticipate it’s going to be as tight a game as it was Sunday. It’s just a matter of coming up with a goal when you need it. That’s what the playoffs really boil down to. In the first two games, we did and they didn’t. In Game 3, they got the big goal and we didn’t.”

The Kings were more aggressive Sunday. Although the tallies of hits and other statistics are sometimes suspect because of bias and varying definitions of what constitutes a hit or a giveaway, King Coach Andy Murray said Sunday’s tally of 50 hits by the Kings and 34 by the Red Wings was in line. Defenseman Jere Karalahti, singled out by Murray as the game’s best player, was credited with eight hits and five blocked shots, both game highs. Stumpel had seven hits, Ziggy Palffy five and Adam Deadmarsh four.

“I think we played pretty good in the third game, but I think we can and need to be better,” Murray said. “We’ve got two things we need to accomplish: First of all, we want to avoid unnecessary penalties, and it’s equally important for our power play to generate some momentum. I still believe our power play will produce, but more important, generate momentum.”

The Kings are 0 for 11 in the series and 0 for 34 in their last seven playoff games on the power play against Detroit. “We have to get set up, but they make it tough,” Deadmarsh said. “Once we get set up, we need to get some traffic in front and hopefully bang in some ugly ones.”

Smolinski credited the Red Wings’ gritty penalty killers for frustrating the Kings. “They read everything real well. They have world-class players,” he said. “They do it the old way, with hard work.”

The kind of work that produces bumps and bruises--and success.

“We don’t want to go back to their building down, 3-1,” Smolinski said. “That’s ridiculous.

“Our game plan is set, and we’ve got to go out and execute. They’re coming off a tough loss and they’re going to throw everything at us.”

The Kings must do the same, or face the prospect of throwing away another season. “We don’t want just to do good in the playoffs. We want to win,” Robitaille said. “It’s a critical game, just like the last one was. . . . We have to be even better.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Powerless Play

The Kings are 0 for 34 in the last seven playoff games on the power play against Detroit, while the Red Wings are 12 for 40 (30%). How they compare in this series:

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Playoff Power play % Reg. season %/ power plays NHL rank Kings 0-11 00.0 19.3 (7) Detroit 5-17 29.4 22.1 (2)

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