Murray: Trade Affects Kings

CALGARY —  Coach Andy Murray said Tuesday that it was wrong to believe that the Kings could pick up this season where they left off at the end of last season, especially after they robbed themselves of some quality depth last month by making the trade for Jason Allison.

The Kings’ roster includes nine players who were not with the team for last season’s late run to the playoffs and first-round upset of the Detroit Red Wings, and Murray said he misjudged how long it would take to come together as a team.

After Tuesday night’s 5-5 tie with the Calgary Flames in front of 14,550 in the Pengrowth Saddledome, they are 2-7-2-1 since the Oct. 24 deal that brought Allison and Mikko Eloranta from the Boston Bruins for Jozef Stumpel and Glen Murray.

With a quarter of their season completed, the Kings will drag the NHL’s third-worst record and a seven-game road winless streak into the finale of a four-game trip against the Edmonton Oilers on Thursday night at Edmonton, Canada.

They have won five of 21 games.

“People say there should be continuity from one season to the next and because you had a great end of the season and a great playoff, it should just continue that way,” Murray said. “Well, we made some decisions that are for the long-term benefit of the Kings, but we may have lost a little bit of that continuity....

“When we made the Allison deal, we gave up two players and we kind of got back half a player. And now he’s maybe a three-quarters player. We’re hoping he becomes two players as we go along. In fact, we hope he’s a 2.5 compared to the other guys only giving us a two--that he can do more than what they were doing.

“But it’s very difficult for him because he did not have a training camp. And yet, because we made the deal, we have to rely on him.”

Allison, who joined the Kings after a six-week holdout in Boston, has three goals and seven assists, including a goal and an assist Tuesday night that gave the all-star center points in seven of the Kings’ last eight games.

In his comments before the game, Murray also reiterated his belief that the Kings are not a talented team and that they can’t rely on their skill to win games.

“I’m talking in terms of depth,” he said. “I don’t think anybody would look at our team and say this is a highly skilled, talented team. But what we’ve come to be known for the last couple years is that we work hard.

“We’ve taken the image of La-La Land out of the equation when you talk about the L.A. Kings. The teams that have played us the last couple of years know that you may beat us, but you’re going to have some welts and bruises to show for it.

“We have to get back to that.”

They did against the Flames, but only in the last 25 minutes.

Playing their fourth game in six nights in four time zones, the Kings gave up a season-high 40 shots and generated only 21 of their own.

But they twice rallied from two-goal deficits, Ziggy Palffy scoring the game’s final goal with 12:21 to play in regulation. And backup goaltender Jamie Storr, who replaced struggling starter Felix Potvin after the Flames scored three goals in under three minutes to open a 4-2 lead at 10:26 of the second period, stopped all but one of the 17 shots he faced, 10 in the third period and overtime.

On a night when NHL scoring leader Jarome Iginla of the Flames scored two more goals to run his point-scoring streak to 14 games and increase his season point total to 33 in 20 games, the Kings might have won if a second-period goal by Eloranta hadn’t been disallowed.

Though an on-ice referee signaled that it was a goal, supervisor of officials Bob Hall intervened, ruling that video replays showed that Eloranta, in the middle of the slot, had struck the puck from above the crossbar.

Murray, however, said that none of the replays showed Eloranta and the net in the same frame, making it impossible for Hall to make a definite ruling.

“That is a terrible call by a supervisor of officials,” the coach said. “He has to be a magician to make that call.... The referee said, ‘We were overruled by the guy upstairs.’ And the guy upstairs did not do his job tonight.”

Until the last 25 minutes, neither did the Kings.

“We were embarrassed after two periods,” Murray said. “Obviously, we showed a lot of battle and kept working at it, but you can’t play out of embarrassment. You can’t appeal to that emotion every night.”