At Least They Know It Isn’t Pretty

In his attempts to rally the troops over an 82-game schedule, King Coach Andy Murray sometimes seems to overreach.

For instance:

“As I told the players,” he said this week, “it’s not good enough at this time of year to come back into the dressing room and say, ‘I played pretty good.’ Pretty good just doesn’t cut it now. I don’t want to hear the pretty anymore; I want to hear the good. And if you think you can be good by playing pretty, you’re making a mistake too, so let’s get pretty out of the equation altogether.

“If you want to come in and say, ‘I played gritty good tonight,’ I’ll accept that. But I don’t want anyone saying, ‘I played pretty good.’”

Say what?

Felix Potvin made 15 of his 31 saves in the last 20 minutes of Thursday night’s 3-0 victory over the Detroit Red Wings, a disappointment to his coach.

“We had a meeting with our team,” Murray said Friday, “because we don’t want Felix to have to be as good as he was in the third period.”

Potvin, with a 2.30 goals-against average in 3,833 minutes played spread across 67 appearances, is closing in on Rogie Vachon’s club records for goals-against average, games and minutes played.

Vachon played 4,107 minutes in 70 games during the 1977-78 season. His club-record goals-against average of 2.24 was set in the 1974-75 season.

Murray, on Jason Allison’s three-point effort against the Red Wings: “I think for $7 million, or whatever he’s going to get next year, you should expect that every night. That’s a responsibility he wants.” ... The Kings have established a club high of 275 points over the last three seasons, one more than they collected from 1990-91 through 1992-93, but it should be noted that 11 points were the result of overtime losses. Before the 1999-2000 season, no points were awarded for overtime losses.