Kings Get Penalized for Being Outworked

Penalty shots are the rarest of NHL rarities. Only a handful are ever awarded in an NHL game. In the Kings’ case an average of fewer than two a season.

On Sunday night, however, two were awarded in the second period at Staples Center and the results provided the difference for the usually low-scoring Minnesota Wild in a 4-3 victory over the Kings in front of 14,354.

The Kings failed to score on theirs, goaltender Manny Fernandez stopping Ziggy Palffy, the Kings’ leading scorer last season.

The Wild scored on its shot, only the fourth penalty shot in the team’s 84-game history, when Sebastien Bordeleau beat Felix Potvin.

“He came straight in and I thought he was going to make a move and he kind of double-pumped and put it in the five hole,” Potvin said of Bordeleau, who whistled a shot between the goaltender’s pads seven minutes into the second period to give the Wild a 3-2 lead. “That was a big goal for them, obviously.”

But not a backbreaker.

Only 7 minutes 13 seconds after Bordeleau was awarded his penalty shot after being impeded from behind by King defenseman Mattias Norstrom, Palffy was wrapped up from behind by Wild defenseman Brad Bombardir.

Fernandez, however, denied Palffy on the penalty shot, flopping onto the ice and sticking out his right leg to stop the puck.

“I was going the wrong way,” Fernandez said, “but I left my pad there and I was lucky he hit it. There’s not much you can do. It’s just reflex.”

It was the first game in King history featuring two penalty shots. Only 61 penalty shots have been awarded in the Kings’ 2,688 regular-season games over 34-plus seasons--28 for the Kings, 33 for their opponents.

Potvin, in his 10th NHL season, had faced only three before Sunday and had never before given up a goal. Fernandez had faced only one.

The last NHL game in which two penalty shots were awarded was last March 4, when Olli Jokinen of the New York Islanders scored and Miroslav Satan of the Buffalo Sabres was stopped in a 4-2 Islander victory at Uniondale, N.Y.

The Kings, though, weren’t much interested in the historical significance of the loss, which left them with a 0-1-1 record after games against the Phoenix Coyotes and the Wild, neither of which is expected to reach the playoffs.

“This has to be a wake-up call for us,” defenseman Mathieu Schneider said. “We can’t afford to have sluggish starts against teams like that.”

Schneider scored his second goal of the game at 5:40 of the third period to pull the Kings even at 3-3, but Wild defenseman Willie Mitchell rifled home the winner on a slap shot from the blue line with 11:56 to play.

Potvin seemed to have a good read on Mitchell’s shot, but the goaltender said it dipped at the last minute, clanging off the right post into the net.

“I’d like to see it again and see what happened,” Potvin said.

Videotape wasn’t needed, however, to see the Kings’ general sloppiness.

“We talked about going out and getting good starts against clubs like that and we went out and did just the opposite,” Schneider said. “For the first period or period and a half, they were winning all the battles--loose pucks, faceoffs. And that was the difference in the hockey game.

“It gave them confidence to play with us. If we’re playing desperate hockey, like we did in the second half of the game, there’s no way that club beats us.”

Perhaps no team in the NHL is more inappropriately nicknamed than the Wild, which is one of the league’s most conservative teams.

Coach Jacques Lemaire’s defense-minded club was shut out a league-high 14 times last season, its first in the NHL, and finished last in the league in scoring, averaging 2.05 goals a game. Then, on Saturday night, the Wild started its second season with a 0-0 tie against the San Jose Sharks at San Jose.

“We knew exactly how Minnesota would play,” King Coach Andy Murray said, “and the bottom line is, we had to outwork a hard-working team and we got outworked.”