Kings Score Late to Tie, Wings Score Later to Win

There was one more opportunity, a fifth power play, and the Kings took advantage of it.

A two-man advantage, actually.

Rob Blake’s goal with 32 seconds to play came when the Kings pulled goalie Steve Passmore for an extra attacker and tied things up with the Detroit Red Wings.

Unfortunately for the Kings, the Red Wings got an even later opportunity.

Steve Yzerman’s second goal of the game came with 4.3 seconds to play and gave the usual revelers at Joe Louis Arena a Happy New Year with a 2-1 Red Wing victory.

After the Kings had finally tied the score, they took a timeout and couldn’t have been planning what they saw, which was Yzerman steaming down the right wing unencumbered by defense and there to take a pass from Igor Larionov.

“When I saw the puck go up in the air, I just took off down the ice,” Yzerman said. “I knew I just needed to get open and he would find me. That’s all you ever need to do with him.”

Bob Corkum was back on defense for the Kings.

“They came down and I tried to get between them to cut off the pass,” he said. “They got it through anyway. This is really disappointing.”

After the Kings went on a power play with 1:41 to play, Blake’s goal went from Luc Robitaille to Bryan Smolinski to Blake, who beat Chris Osgood.

It also matched Yzerman’s first goal earlier in the third period, which was scored when Passmore was screened by teammate Mattias Norstrom.

What the 19,995 on hand saw was a defensive struggle in which for two periods the teams treated shots like diamonds.

“Our goalie kept us in it again,” Blake said. “Both goalies played a great game.”

It became a matter of which goalie would blink.

“I blinked, he blinked, then I blinked,” Passmore said.

Passmore and Osgood had offsetting respites.

In the opening period, the Kings had only two shots, one by Smolinski on his opening shift, one by Robitaille at 10:10. Neither particularly stirred Osgood, who could have had a few folks over to the crease for New Year’s Eve drinks, his lot was so easy.

At the other end, Passmore was attacked 10 times, five of those coming on two Red Wing power plays in which they showed they had retained what they learned in sweeping the Kings in the opening round of last season’s playoffs. They stationed Martin Lapointe and Tomas Holmstrom in Passmore’s face, there to screen him and create redirection opportunities.

Passmore’s role was to be somewhat of a reluctant host, with the occasional stick across the back of each, and the odd shove to keep them off balance.

In the second period, Passmore could have called home and held a 20-minute conversation. The Red Wings could count only shots by Lapointe and Kirk Maltby, neither of which raised Passmore’s pulse.

But Osgood’s party ended early, when a Blake power-play blast from the blue line was tipped by Robitaille into the goalie’s chest and then to the ice, where Robitaille tried it again to no avail.

Osgood escaped danger later in the period when, on a penalty kill, Kelly Buchberger found himself on the left wing, with Blake on the right and a lone defender between them and the goal at their mercy. But Buchberger’s pass hopped over Blake’s stick and the Red Wings breathed easier.

That all made later-period shots by Nelson Emerson and Brad Chartrand much easier to take.

In the end, though, Passmore was victimized by Yzerman, who took a cross-ice pass from Nicklas Lidstrom and fired away to give the Red Wings a 1-0 lead.

The loss left the Kings a point away from last season’s pace. They had 43 points in a 39-game span remarkably like that of this season. Now they have 42.

And it was the first loss on a trip that saw victories in St. Louis and Dallas, with a game at Colorado to go before they return home.