King Streak Gone in Flash

No matter how hard they tried, no matter how frantically they battled, the Kings couldn’t sustain the magic Saturday at Staples Center.

Adam Deadmarsh clanged a shot off the left post.

Jason Allison banged one off the right.

Captain Mattias Norstrom, suffering from stomach flu, begged out after playing only two shifts, leaving the Kings with five defensemen. Winger Craig Johnson also became ill, leaving midway through the third period.

For the first time in 12 games, they gave up a power-play goal.

It all added up to a well-earned 3-2 victory for the road-weary but resilient New York Islanders, who, in the last game of a five-game, 11-day trip, avenged a 3-0 loss to the Kings on Jan. 5 at Uniondale, N.Y.

In front of a sellout crowd of 18,158, the Islanders surprised the Kings by scoring three goals in the first 23 minutes, two in the first 21/2 minutes of the second period, and made them stand up in ending the Kings’ three-game winning streak.

The Kings, who have outscored their foes by 22 goals in the third period, mounted a comeback, getting second-period goals from rookie Adam Mair, his first with the Kings, and Ziggy Palffy, his 12th of the season and third in four games.

But, despite a determined effort, they were unable to add another, losing for only the second time in nine games. They are 6-13 in one-goal games.

“I still believed we could win the game because we’d been playing so well,” winger Steve Heinze said. “I still thought we could pull it out, but when you start out that slow and that bad, that’s a tough deficit to come back from.

“We just weren’t ready. It’s a mental game. You’ve got to be prepared. We had a day between games, so we weren’t tired or anything. We just weren’t ready.”

Perhaps, after losing only three of their previous 19 games, the Kings had simply come to expect good things to happen for them.

“Complacency?” Heinze asked. “Yeah, maybe you think, ‘Jeez, we keep winning, we’ll keep doing it and it’s going to be easy.’ I hope it doesn’t happen to this team because we’ve had to work real hard to get back to where we’re at, and we’re nowhere near where we want to be or need to be.”

King goaltender Felix Potvin had stopped 28 shots in holding the Islanders scoreless two weeks ago, but his bid for a second consecutive shutout against his former team ended only 62 seconds into the game.

Former Duck winger Kip Miller, leading the American Hockey League in scoring when the Islanders signed him Wednesday, scored his first goal for his new team on a shot from the right faceoff circle that squirted between Potvin’s pads.

Later in the period, the Kings killed penalties by Ian Laperriere and Heinze, running their streak of penalties killed to a club-record 46 in a row.

Only 28 seconds into the second period, however, with Mikko Eloranta in the penalty box for hooking, the streak ended when defenseman Adrian Aucoin scored on a shot from the blue line, giving the Islanders a 2-0 lead.

Fewer than two minutes later, Islander winger Mariusz Czerkawski took a pass from Alexei Yashin and poked the puck into the net for his 15th goal.

Though they’d given up only eight shots, the Kings trailed, 3-0.

“I’m sure Felix would like to have the first one back, and the next two we made a couple little mistakes,” Coach Andy Murray said. “But it wasn’t like we made a lot of mistakes. They were very opportunistic, capitalized, battled real hard.”

With Norstrom unavailable and Philippe Boucher sidelined after suffering a concussion in Thursday night’s 4-2 victory over the Buffalo Sabres, the Kings played most of the game without two of their top defensemen.

Jaroslav Modry logged a season-high 29 minutes 15 seconds of ice time, and Aaron Miller and Mathieu Schneider also played more than 25 minutes.

“It was a long night, but I thought we played pretty well,” Miller said. “But we gave up those goals early and gave up a power-play goal, which we haven’t been doing lately, and that cost us the game.”

In the end, their slow start was too much to overcome.

“It’s not like we didn’t work hard,” Laperriere said. “We did, for maybe 40 minutes. For 20 minutes, we didn’t, and it’s tough to battle back against a team like that, or any team, if you shoot yourself in the foot early in the game.”