Win Is Passing Fancy for Fiset

By JIM HODGES

Oct. 31, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

CHICAGO — The door was shut, the lights stayed off, and Stephane Fiset was downright antisocial to the Blackhawks who were camped out on his porch much of Saturday night.

Fiset stopped 35 shots in the Kings’ 3-1 win, and from the other end of the ice, his Chicago counterpart could only murmur “bravo.”

“We tried to build on our last couple of games, but we got beat by Fiset on the other side,” said Blackhawk goalie Jocelyn Thibault, the King goaltender’s roommate when the two were with Quebec and Colorado.

Fiset beat the Blackhawks with defense . . . and offense.

The lone Chicago goal came from Alexei Zhamnov in the third period, and arithmetic made one scored by the Kings’ Brad Chartrand a period earlier the game-winner . . . with an assist by Fiset.

While the Kings were killing off one of six Chicago power plays, Fiset turned back a shot from the Blackhawks’ Anders Eriksson, controlled the puck and looked around for somebody to send it to. Finding no one, he lobbed it over everybody.

Everybody but Chartrand, who found himself with open ice in front of him when he gathered in the puck, so he skated in on Thibault and punched the shot past him, just below the crossbar, for his first NHL goal.

And, of course, a story goes with it.

“I could see the play developing, and it’s weird when you’ve never had an NHL goal before, the things that go through your head,” said Chartrand, a rookie winger who spent much of the night at center because third-line center Ian Laperriere spent much of his night in the penalty box because of a couple of fights with the Blackhawks’ Bryan McCabe.

“Fiz made a great play,” Chartrand said of Fiset. “It happened so quickly, and I saw Fiz and it was an eye-contact type thing. He lofted it up in the air, and he made a great play and I converted it.”

You want to stay with that story?

“I won’t say he threw it on my tape, but it was definitely an attempt by him to throw it up the middle to cause some commotion,” Chartrand insisted.

OK, Fiset’s turn.

First of all, it wasn’t an attempt to cause some commotion. Fiset was trying to stop some.

“No,” he said, laughing at the idea of considering an assist when he launched the puck.

“I shot the puck, and I had it in my mind to shoot the puck all the way down [to the other end of the ice to clear it], but I missed my shot. Instead, I find Chartie and he scores. It looked perfect on TV . . . but I missed my shot.

“You don’t have time to stop the puck, look at the puck, see if you have somebody open and shoot the puck at them. He may have looked at me, but I never saw him.”

Still, Fiset will take the accidental assist, his 11th as an NHL goalie.

He helped the Kings to their fourth consecutive win, a victory that ended a Blackhawk winning streak at two games. The second of those Chicago wins had come Friday night at Detroit, so the idea was to keep pressure on the Blackhawks in hopes that they would wilt.

It worked, sort of.

A goal by Glen Murray three minutes into the game wilted most of the announced 14,694 at United Center.

Donald Audette won the puck on the boards near the King bench and skated in with Murray, with only Chicago’s McCabe between them. Audette’s pass was on Murray’s stick, and he sent it past Thibault for a 1-0 lead.

That became 2-0 in the second period on the Fiset-Chartrand hookup, and 3-0 when Rob Blake hammered home a shot later in the period.

Zhamnov’s third-period goal cut into the margin and angered the Kings’ Aki Berg, who was crosschecked by Chicago’s Tony Amonte at the goalmouth. Berg was tangled with Fiset when Doug Gilmour sent the pass to Zhamnov for the easy goal.

It was a reward of sorts for the Blackhawks, who had outshot the Kings, 28-17, over two periods and were down, 3-0.

And many of those shots came within a stick-length of Fiset.

“It’s been like that since the beginning of the season,” he said. “[The King defense] clears the front of the net, so [the opposition] can’t get a rebound.”

The Blackhawks had plenty of close-in shots, but they also had one-shot trips down the ice all night.

And so did Chartrand on his first NHL goal, courtesy of Fiset. It’s Chartrand’s story, and he’s sticking to it.

HOT HAND

Bruins’ Grahame has 26 saves to earn his first career shutout. Page 15