Kings Losing Playoff Grip

Sometimes a tie can feel like a victory and there are other times when it’s like a defeat.

Based on how the Kings were booed off the ice after a 4-4 tie with the Vancouver Canucks, it was easy to tell how Tuesday night’s game ended for the home team in front of a sellout Staples Center crowd of 18,118.

The Kings blew a two-goal lead late in the third period and had to hang on for their playoff lives in overtime. With the point, the Kings’ winless streak reached five games and their 87 points moved them into a tie with Edmonton for sixth place in the Western Conference.

Philippe Boucher, Mathieu Schneider and Mikko Eloranta each scored power-play goals for the Kings, who were three of five with a man advantage. That normally would have been good enough for a victory, but the Kings’ penalty-killing unit continued to struggle by giving up three power-play goals.

King goaltender Felix Potvin gave up goals to Ed Jovanovski and Markus Naslund 64 seconds apart in the final 2:30 of the third period. The goals came on shots that Potvin probably would love to see again as the Kings failed to hold on to a point they can only hope doesn’t come back to haunt them in their drive for a playoff berth.

“It would have been very tough to leave here without any points,” Naslund said about the Canucks, who moved ahead of Dallas with 84 points. “It was a situation where our season would have been over. We didn’t let that happen. I think you can tell by the desperate play we had at the end.”

Only two weeks ago, there would have been no way that the Kings gave up two power-play goals in a period, let alone three in a game. But after having the best penalty-killing unit in the league that had given up more than two power-play goals in a game only once in their first 72 games, the Kings have had more than their share of problems when short-handed.

They gave up three power-play goals in games at Vancouver and Calgary last week and three against the Canucks Tuesday. The Kings are 0-3-2-0 in their last five games.

“We made some poor decisions, Mark [Hardy] does a great job of preparing them,” King Coach Andy Murray said about the Kings’ struggling penalty killers. “It is simplistic to say it was poor execution on our part and a good power play by the Vancouver Canucks. I don’t think our players got dumb or we got dumb as coaches over the last week.”

The Kings grabbed a 1-0 lead 76 seconds into the first period on Adam Deadmarsh’s 27th goal, thanks to a great cross-ice pass from Ziggy Palffy.

The Kings continued to control the flow until Vancouver went on a power-play at the 7:22 mark, thanks to a board check by King defenseman Lubomir Visnovsky. It didn’t take the Canucks long to tie the score.

Defenseman Mattias Norstrom had his clearing attempt kept in the King zone by Jovanovski and he found an open Todd Bertuzzi in front of the net. Bertuzzi beat Potvin for his 32nd goal at 7:29.

Vancouver kept up the pressure and it resulted in a 2-1 lead on another power-play goal from behind the King net, Bertuzzi finding Henrik Sedin outside the right post for his 15th goal.

With Palffy leading the charge, the Kings regained control in the second period and tied the score, 2-2, on a power-play goal from Boucher at 15:46.

King forward Bryan Smolinski, who has been one step out of Murray’s doghouse for a lack of offensive production, played one of his better games. He set up Boucher’s goal with a strong move to the net. Smolinski had two shots stopped by Dan Cloutier but the Vancouver goalie could not block Boucher on the rebound.

In the third period, Schneider scored his seventh goal when he had his power-play shot from the point slightly deflected by a Canuck defender and past Cloutier, who was screened by two Kings in front of him at 5:01.

The Kings then took a 4-2 lead when Eloranta scored L.A.’s third power-play goal, thanks to another perfect assist from Palffy, who found his teammate in front of the crease at 10:55.

But that only set the stage for the Kings’ collapse.

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