Kings Dig Deep Again

It takes a village to build a playoff contender.

Or, in the case of the Kings, a small village. They’ve been forced to use 37 players this season because of an avalanche of injuries, and never was their depth more evident than in Monday’s 3-0 victory over the Nashville Predators.

Their all-around performance at Staples Center before an announced crowd of 17,612 put them back into a playoff spot, moving them into a sixth-place tie with Nashville in the Western Conference. The road-weary Predators, playing their third game in four nights, suffered their first loss in four games. Both teams have 69 points but Nashville owns the tiebreaker with six more wins.

The Kings have used 37 players this season -- which is among the league leaders -- and four helped lead the way against Nashville: forwards Ian Laperriere, Eric Belanger (two assists) and Michael Cammalleri (goal) and goaltender Cristobal Huet.

At the forefront were Laperriere, who had his second straight two-goal game, and Huet, who had his third shutout of the season and fourth of his career, making 21 saves.

They were Laperriere’s seventh and eighth goals of the season. His second of the night, a nifty deflection from the edge of the right circle that went between the pads of Nashville goalie Tomas Vokoun, was his 200th NHL point and came on a power play at 6:02 of the third period.

Even Laperriere enjoyed the view of his milestone, grinning widely from the bench when the replay was shown on the scoreboard big-screen. Suddenly, Mr. Energy is turning into Mr. Goal Scorer. The offense is starting to flow from Laperriere’s stick.

He has six goals in his last eight games, four in his last two.

“I don’t go by points,” Laperriere said. “I’ve never been looking at points in my career and if you look at my points, that’s not really my job. But I’ll take that. To help the team keep winning, if I can do that scoring goals, hopefully I’ll be able to have a couple more by the end of the year.”

The recent surge was especially sweet, considering he had missed 19 games because of a concussion earlier in the season. It wasn’t career-threatening, but any serious head injury is a concern for any player.

“For a player like me who’s been around for a little while -- I wanted to play one game and I’m close to 700. I’m still dreaming,” Laperriere said. “It’s a great, great life to play hockey. Even after 10 years, I enjoy every moment of it.”

He is self-effacing to a fault. Asked what he would have said if someone had told him he would score four goals in two games, Laperriere laughed and said: “I know.... There’s no better feeling than scoring goals, trust me. You score one, well, if you score 50, it’s a better feeling. Every game means so much and every goal means so much.”

His line had the difficult assignment of trying to shut down the Predators’ potent scoring line of Steve Sullivan, Scott Walker and David Legwand. Nashville had scored 18 goals in its previous three games.

“That line obviously had a job tonight to play against probably the hottest line in the league, the last three or four games,” King Coach Andy Murray said. “What we wanted to do was eliminate them, and obviously to come out ahead of them on the score sheet was a positive for us.”

So, how did they do it? “Probably fear,” Murray said. “We see what they’ve been doing. I think our work ethic and physicality made the difference tonight.”

The second effort made the difference at the other end too, in particular on Laperriere’s first goal, at 8:23 of the first period, a play started by a Walker turnover, and on Cammalleri’s goal, his ninth of the season, at 2:45 of the second. It came on a nice move around Nashville defenseman Kimmo Timonen, as Cammalleri cut the other way and beat Vokoun on the stick side.

For the Kings, the only suspense in the final minutes was whether Huet would get the shutout. His other two this season were at Colorado and at Pittsburgh.

“I thought we did a good job for the most part, taking their time and space away, but he was good,” Murray said of Huet. “He was able to see the puck well.”

Said Huet: “We played very well from the drop of the puck. Everybody’s played very well defensively lately.”