Young Blues Present a Minor Problem for Kings

The best of the St. Louis Blues--who are good enough to have fashioned the second-best record in the NHL--couldn’t handle the Kings at St. Louis only two weeks ago.

The rest of the St. Louis Blues were better Saturday night.

Daniel Corso, who started the weekend with Worcester of the AHL, had a goal and two assists in a 4-2 victory over the Kings, who listened to opportunity knock, were at home at Staples Center, but spent two periods ignoring the door.

“We talked about it this morning,” King Coach Andy Murray said. “We said they had two pretty good players out and would be circling the wagons. . . . They had a couple of young guys come up and do a good job.”

The Kings had a couple of guys who have been up for years who didn’t.

“To a man, they were better tonight,” Murray said.

Corso, Marty Reasoner and Ladislav Nagy certainly were. All were called up in recent days when Pierre Turgeon and Michael Handzus joined Pavol Demitra on injured reserve.

The young trio combined for six shots, Corso’s goal and three assists.

The Kings’ Ziggy Palffy and a host of veteran teammates combined for none.

“I think what you saw here tonight is a Blues’ team that played very disciplined, worked very hard, beat us to all the loose pucks and played with a lot of composure,” Murray said. “They denied us space all over the rink.”

And they took up space at the net in front of goalie Jamie Storr, who fished out pucks delivered by Corso, Tyson Nash, Scott Young and Chris Pronger.

“They had some new guys, and so they put enough guys in front of the net,” Storr said. “They have [defensemen] Pronger and [Al] MacInnis back there to shoot, and every time they did, the puck hit somebody.”

Often that somebody was Storr, but not often enough.

The evening offered the Kings a chance to overtake Edmonton and Phoenix and spend a little time on the Western Conference playoff ladder after a month or so of looking up at it. Instead, a standing-room-only crowd of 18,460 tried to stay awake while second-period goals by Nash and Young gave St. Louis a 3-1 lead and were answered by only four King shots.

The Kings managed only 11 shots in two periods.

“We only had 11 shots because we turned the puck over too often,” Murray said. “You’ve got to get the puck in their end to shoot.”

The throng stirred in the third when Glen Murray knocked home his own rebound for a power-play goal to cut the margin to 3-2, and when Storr denied Reasoner twice and Nagy once on blasts from within bartender range the next time St. Louis visited the King zone.

“When he stopped those shots, I said on the bench, ‘Jamie’s trying to give us a chance to get back in it,’ ” Andy Murray said.

But it was too little, too late for a team that can’t exactly be called the Komeback Kings. They are 0-13-1 when trailing after two periods.

In the end, the Blues’ answer was kids who were still in the minor leagues when the Kings won, 5-2, on Dec. 28 at St. Louis.

“They were great,” Blues’ Coach Joel Quenneville said. “I give the guys a lot of credit. They were well-positioned all night. Their offensive creativity, they had a couple of great chances that didn’t go in too.”

Maybe it will even keep Corso in the NHL awhile longer.

This is his second call-up this season for a tough organization to please. In the first, he was around for one game and scored the only goal in a 1-0 win over the Mighty Ducks on Dec. 2.

The kids joined Blues’ rookie goalie Brent Johnson, who is fast rendering No. 1 goalie Roman Turek a spectator. Johnson’s 1.60 goals-against average was dented by Murray and Jozef Stumpel, both of whom scored on power-play goals.

Luc Robitaille helped on both, earning his 1,199th and 1,200th NHL assists.

“[Their play was] very similar to our game in St. Louis when we played against them to start our last road trip,” said Andy Murray, who was not at all happy with the Kings’ effort. “If you changed the jerseys and saw the same type of effort on the part of the two teams, that’s exactly the way we played in St. Louis that night.”

Actually, many of the Blues did change jerseys Saturday night, from Worcester’s to St. Louis’.