Kings get a tough lesson

This one will sting, and it should.

The Kings began the third period Monday at Staples Center with a lead, a string of penalty-killing successes and the knowledge they had been able to match the Toronto Maple Leafs hit for hit and shove for shove over the first 40 minutes.

Two lapses -- two needless penalties -- were all it took for them to unravel.

They lost the lead and the game, 3-1, missing a chance to move two games above .500 for the first time since the 2005-06 season and slipping behind Columbus and Colorado in the Western Conference standings.

It makes no difference that the Kings, now and eternally rebuilding, are a young team and that young teams are prone to mistakes. It makes no difference that the Kings, still finding their identity and their footing in a tough conference, weren’t supposed to be in the top eight or 10 or maybe 12 in the West.

What matters is they gave themselves a better than decent chance to win and let it slip away. That’s part of a learning process, and if this lesson doesn’t sink in, none ever will.

“Tonight’s game was not a reflection of our age,” defenseman Matt Greene said. “We’ve been getting those penalty kills. We didn’t tonight.”

The Maple Leafs scored twice against Jason LaBarbera on power plays early in the third period, the first time with a two-man advantage and the second with a one-man edge, and clinched it with an empty-net goal by Jeff Finger, giving Brian Burke a 2-0 record since his coronation as their president and general manager.

They were 0-3-2 before his arrival, so he’s likely to be nominated for sainthood any day now by the denizens of the self-proclaimed Center of the Hockey Universe.

Burke, who resigned as Ducks’ GM for family reasons, was out of a job for only the few days it took for him to forge a six-year deal with Toronto. He had planned to attend Monday’s game but was held up by bad weather back East. Mother Nature may be the only force greater than Burke.

The Leafs’ victory notwithstanding, he faces a formidable challenge in bringing the Stanley Cup to Toronto after an absence of 41 years and counting. He had an exceptionally good foundation to build on in Anaheim in engineering the Ducks’ 2007 Cup triumph, but he appears to have less to work with in Toronto.

Coach Ron Wilson is more optimistic. “Our team doesn’t quit,” he said. “When we were down one, I talked to the guys and said it was an almost perfect road game. They couldn’t put us away.”

Still, this game is one Burke likely would have enjoyed. The Kings scored 57 seconds into the game, on Alexander Frolov’s solo backhander off a long lead pass from Greene, and they maintained that lead until early in the third.

With the Kings’ Sean O’Donnell and Dustin Brown serving tripping penalties they had taken at 12 seconds and 1:59, respectively, Matt Stajan tied it when he swatted in the puck after a scramble in front.

It was well timed, coming with three seconds left in the first penalty. Toronto took the lead by taking advantage of a mistake by O’Donnell on the ensuing five-on-four. His clearing pass off the boards was intercepted by John Mitchell, who threw the puck in front to an unchecked Mikhail Grabovski for an easy wrist shot.

The Kings think they’re a better team than in previous seasons. They’ve generally played like one this season and did so for the first 40 minutes Monday. They didn’t play like one in the third period, leaving open the question of where they are in their maturation and where they will end up as this season unfolds.

“When you’re the Red Wings or San Jose, you know where you’re going to be. Here, you’re not sure where you’re going to end up, so I didn’t speculate about where we were going to be,” Brown said.

“You’ve just got to see how the thing comes together. I think now we have a pretty good vibe in the room. Even during that five-game losing streak, you feel that it was different from years past.”

The loss was disturbingly like years past, and Brown blamed himself for the team’s downfall because he took a bad penalty while the team was already one man down.

“We’re five-on-three and they score and they came back and scored five-on-four,” he said. “It was one of those games where we knew what to do.”

But they didn’t do it, just like they didn’t put the Leafs away in those first two periods.

“I think we played a pretty good game,” he said.

Pretty good wasn’t nearly good enough Monday and they have to do better than good enough to make this rebuilding thing a reality.

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