This Is No Time to Relax

On a Saturday morning in Detroit nearly five months ago, Coach Andy Murray first told the Kings they would need 93 points to make the playoffs.

At the time, they were only hours away from a 4-2 loss to the Detroit Red Wings that would leave them with a 5-11-1-2 record, 13 points in 19 games.

They would need 80 more, Murray figured, in their last 63. A struggling team that was six games under .500 at the time, in other words, would have to play the rest of the season at 17 over.

It was as if he had told them, “Oh, by the way, you might want to prepare yourself: That marathon we’re about to run will take us over Mt. Everest.”

The next morning, meeting without coaches before a game at St. Paul, Minn., the players basically told themselves, “We’d better get started.”

It must have seemed daunting.

“At the time, it did,” left wing Craig Johnson said Sunday. “We knew we could do it, we still believed, but we knew we’d have to play some unbelievable hockey.”

They ran in place for three weeks, going 3-3-3 in their next nine games, but with a 5-2 victory over the Chicago Blackhawks on Dec. 9 the Kings began a 30-11-7-2 surge, fashioning the NHL’s best record over the last four months.

And with four games to play in the season’s final seven days, starting tonight against the Dallas Stars at Staples Center in the finale of a four-game homestand, they are within two points of Murray’s magic number.

But now, the coach has come to realize, “93 might not do it.”

Two points in four games--one victory, two ties or even two overtime losses--might not be enough to get the Kings into the Western Conference playoffs.

Their remaining schedule is loaded with potential landmines too:

* The Stars and Vancouver Canucks, who they’ll play Thursday night at Vancouver, Canada, are struggling to remain in the playoff race.

* The San Jose Sharks, their opponents Saturday at San Jose, are trying to win their first division championship and lock up the No. 2 seeding in the West. And, as if that weren’t motivation enough, they’re 0-4 against the Kings.

* The Mighty Ducks, their opponents in Sunday’s season finale at Staples Center, are long out of the playoff picture but have warmed to the role of spoilers in the last two weeks, defeating the Stars, Phoenix Coyotes and Edmonton Oilers.

Additional motivation: The Ducks are 0-3-1 against the Kings.

“We still have the toughest schedule of any of the teams left,” Murray said Sunday, “but we’ve had the toughest [last] 20 games, the toughest 15, the toughest 12, the toughest six.”

Still, he said, the Kings control their future: “It’s nice to be able to say, ‘Let’s just win our games and take it from there.’”

Murray said he doesn’t usually set numeric goals for his teams but that he believed the Kings’ plight in mid-November demanded action.

“It was just to try to put some immediate focus on that, we’ve got to get it going right away here,” he said. “I don’t like ever putting point totals on the board and saying, ‘We need to get this.’

“But I felt at that time we needed to have something tangible to say, ‘Hey, this is what it’s going to take and we’ve got to get going here.’ We were setting a goal at that point of just getting into the playoffs, and we felt with 93 we’d make it. I could have said 100 points, or whatever, but you’ve got to be somewhat realistic.

“When you were playing at the level we were playing at, even to get to 93 our winning percentage for the rest of the year had to be so good.”

He’ll know by Sunday evening if it has been good enough.