There’s Point to the Kings’ Performance

The Kings, about to embark on the most demanding stretch of their schedule over the next several weeks, sent themselves out on the road with a 1-1 tie against the St. Louis Blues on Thursday night in front of 15,055 at Staples Center.

Though the Kings still haven’t won at home against the Blues since Jan. 11, 1997, an 0-7-3 stretch in which they’ve been outscored, 37-20, they were happy to walk away with a tie after being outshot, 3-0, in overtime.

“I think we played tough tonight,” said goaltender Felix Potvin, who stopped 22 shots. “We played hard and we stuck to our game. That’s the way we’ve got to play in these low scoring games. It was a big point for us.”

The Kings, who play eight of their next 10 games and 13 of their next 18 on the road, were fortunate to escape after Blue defenseman Chris Pronger fired a rebound wide of an open net early in the overtime period.

Then, with less than 10 seconds to play, Potvin stopped a shot from the right faceoff circle by high-scoring defenseman Al MacInnis.

“That was a pretty scary sight when you look up and see him,” Potvin said. “Fortunately, I think the puck was bouncing on the ice and he didn’t get all of it.”

The Kings, trying to turn their season around, spent the days leading up to the game soul-searching and reassessing as they tried to shake a disappointing start in which they had fallen 10 points behind in the playoff race.

On Wednesday, Coach Andy Murray told reporters that he was taking a step back and would approach the remainder of the season as if he were a new coach being brought in from the outside to remedy the situation.

“Sometimes, you can’t see the forest for the trees and you’ve got to back away from it and take a look at it,” he said. “That’s not to say that what we’ve done has been wrong. It’s just a matter of, what can we do better?”

The coach said that he had temporarily shelved the team’s season theme of “best ever,” as in, “season in King history,” because the Kings weren’t deserving of it. Instead, the Kings would simply try to go back to being “tough to play against,” he said, adopting their more modest theme from two seasons ago.

Tellingly, he got no argument from inside the locker room.

“Nobody’s happy in the room right now [about] where we are,” center Ian Laperriere said before the game. “We want to be a better team.”

Laperriere, one of the team’s four alternate captains, said the Kings realized weeks ago that they needed to start producing.

“But realizing it and doing it are two different things,” he said. “We realize we’ve got to do something, but we’ve got to do it on the ice. We talk about it in the paper--Andy’s talking about it; the players are talking about it. But talk and doing it, it’s two [different] things. Let’s do it, and after we’ll talk.

“The way we can solve what’s going in right now is to go out there and play hard and win. There’s no other solution. Winning solves everything.”

They started slowly Thursday, putting only three shots on net in the first period. Another, by Laperriere, caromed off the crossbar midway through the period.

The Blues, whose 3-0 loss to the Phoenix Coyotes on Wednesday night at Phoenix ended a five-game unbeaten streak, took a 1-0 lead at 4:03 of the second period when Cory Stillman scored from the bottom of the right faceoff circle after taking a cross-the-slot pass from Scott Mellanby.

Bryan Smolinski pulled the Kings even with a power-play goal at 16:02, scoring on the rebound of a shot from the blue line by defenseman Jaroslav Modry. The point was only the fourth in 17 games for the struggling Smolinski.

“It’s good to get a goal and have it mean something,” Smolinski said. “I was frustrated for a long time. Now, let’s keep it going.”