Kings Put Wings in the Red

By HELENE ELLIOTT

April 22, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

DETROIT — If no one outside the Kings’ locker room believed they could upset the Detroit Red Wings and win their first-round playoff series, they didn’t care.

“We’re the only ones that matter. We’ve got to play the games,” defenseman Aaron Miller said. “After the first two games, we knew we couldn’t win playing that way. We made some changes, and they’ve worked.

“I’m sure there are still people out there who don’t think we can win. There’s still a lot of work to do, but I like the way we’re playing.”

As well he should.

Displaying plenty of discipline, even more intelligence and still more heart, the Kings on Saturday defeated the Red Wings, 3-2, shocking the 1997 and ’98 Stanley Cup champions and vacuuming the life out of a sold-out Joe Louis Arena. Although the Red Wings were 19-0-2 at home since Dec. 27--including victories over the Kings in the first two games of this series--the Kings emerged with a three-game winning streak and a 3-2 series lead.

“One loss and you’re done,” Darren McCarty said in the silence of the Red Wings’ locker room. “And if that doesn’t give us desperation, I don’t know what does.”

The Kings have two chances to win one game, the first Monday at Staples Center. A seventh game, if necessary, would be Wednesday in Detroit.

“It’s an incredible turnaround for us, with not a lot of playoff experience,” defenseman Mattias Norstrom said. “We’ve got the feeling that not only can we play with these guys, we can beat them.”

Still surfing the emotional wave of their series-tying, 4-3 overtime comeback Wednesday, the Kings ignored the hostile crowd of 19,995 Saturday and deflated the psychological lift Brendan Shanahan gave his teammates by unexpectedly returning from a foot injury he suffered in Game 1. The Red Wings are older and more battle-tested, but the Kings were poised and opportunistic.

“We had said that we hadn’t played as well as we’re capable in any game to this point, and I still think we can be better yet,” Coach Andy Murray said. “I just think we could be more consistent shift by shift. There were some moments we were not as solid as we could be. But it’s great to have realized that goal we had of getting to a Game 6.”

The Kings haven’t won a playoff series since they defeated the Toronto Maple Leafs in the 1993 conference finals and haven’t clinched one at home since they polished off the Vancouver Canucks in a six-game second-round series in 1993. But they already have erased so many blots on their playoff history during this series, who’s to say they can’t delete a few more?

“I won’t say, ‘Wow, how could this happen?’ ” Norstrom said. “Before the series we knew we could compete and play with Detroit, and if we put our best game out there, we could beat them. We showed tonight what we can do.”

They played with a lead that was created when Ziggy Palffy raced off the bench, took a lob pass from Norstrom, outraced Steve Duchesne and beat Chris Osgood one-on-one 1:15 into the game. They padded that at 1:51 of the second period on a beautiful passing sequence begun by Luc Robitaille, kept alive on a backhand pass across the goal mouth by Eric Belanger and finished off by Ian Laperriere. That gave the Kings their biggest lead of the series and biggest since they held (and later squandered) a 3-0 lead over St. Louis in Game 3 of their 1998 first-round series.

“Luc made a great play at the blue line,” said Belanger, who scored the winner in Game 4 and was solid again. “I got open and I knew Lappy would go to the net. I just made the play and he put it in.”

Vyacheslav Kozlov poked a rebound under Felix Potvin’s stick 33 seconds into the third period to trim the Kings’ lead to 2-1, but they responded 65 seconds later when Adam Deadmarsh finished a two-on-one with Palffy by lifting a shot over the stick of a diving Chris Chelios and a helpless Osgood. “I can’t point fingers,” Osgood said. “I don’t want to do that because it’s a team game. They are one of the top-scoring teams in the league. We’ve got to tighten up defensively.”

The Red Wings pressed frantically in the late stages, producing a goal by Chelios through a crowd at 12:46, but the Kings didn’t break.

“We didn’t expect an easy game,” Potvin said. “They battled real hard in the third. It was good that we could hang in there at the end.”

Good? Just good?

“We’ve still got to get the fourth one,” Robitaille said. “There’s no doubt in my mind they’re going to play their best game the next game. Those guys are champions.

“We feel good about ourselves, but we know if we let up for one second, those guys are going to stick it to us.”

Said Palffy: “We have to stay on the ground. We don’t have to change anything. We have the 3-2 lead and it’s up to us. We can control our game.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GAME 6 MONDAY

7:30 p.m. at Staples Center

TV: Fox Sports Net

Kings lead series, 3-2

OZ SPEAKS

Detroit goalie Chris Osgood did not mince words when analyzing the Red Wings’ performance and what they have to do to even the series. D14

SATURDAY’S OTHER GAMES

DALLAS: 3

EDMONTON: 1