Even Avalanche Attack Doesn’t Wake Up Kings

DENVER — All of the defensive prowess, the bodies thrown in front of pucks and at attackers, the No Man’s Land established in front of the King net were missing in action Tuesday night.

No Man’s Land?

First it was Joe Sakic Land, then it became Everyman’s Land in Colorado’s 6-2 victory, the Kings’ second loss in a row, their seventh in their last 10 games.

“Somebody unplugged us before the game tonight,” Coach Andy Murray said. “We didn’t have anything going from the first minute.”

Defense?

Goalie Steve Passmore struggled for the first time since being recalled Dec. 26 from Chicago of the IHL, but most of the goals went largely unchallenged by a King defense that alternately missed assignments, skated in a fog and was physically beaten.

Sakic, who ended up with five points for the night, scored the initial two goals. First, he overpowered Mattias Norstrom to direct in a puck sent netward by Greg de Vries, then he slipped by Jaroslav Modry to hammer home a puck sent by Milan Hejduk.

“Everything went in for us,” said Sakic. “My two goals were easy.

“It seemed like our line had a scoring chance every shift. . . . On their side, they probably feel that they didn’t play very well, especially defensively, and it was open for us.”

That’s why he earned assists on both goals by Hejduk that gave the Avalanche a 4-0 lead; and on a goal by Alex Tanguay, which nipped a King rally in the bud and built a 5-2 advantage in the second period.

That line has 16 goals and 13 assists in its last six games.

“Last six games?” Sakic quipped. “I thought that was tonight.”

Sakic has five goals and nine points in two games over 12 days against the Kings, and that has helped him mightily toward his 55 points, tops in the NHL.

“He’s one of the most consistent players in the league,” King winger Kelly Buchberger said.

And he was playing against one of the most inconsistent teams. The Kings won at St. Louis and Dallas in what Murray called “this road trip through hell,” then lost in the final 4.3 seconds at Detroit before falling apart Tuesday night.

Murray sized up the situation after the game and called the team together in the dressing room, summoning about half of the Kings off the bus that would take them to the Denver airport.

His meeting lasted only four minutes and, rather than providing the expected explosion, the coach supplied a pep talk.

“We weren’t ourselves tonight,” Murray said. “I just told them that we appreciated the effort in the first three games.”

As a reward, he canceled practice for all but a few of the players today, telling them not to show up at HealthSouth Training Center, even for an off-ice workout.

“If anybody had said before the trip that we would be .500 on it, most people would have been surprised,” Murray said.

But most of the Kings weren’t satisfied.

The Kings won the first two games, “but we were still in ninth place,” Rob Blake said. “We were flat tonight. We might have competed with them for 10 minutes.”

That’s about how long it took Sakic to score twice.

After that, the floodgates opened, countered only by goals from Mathieu Schneider--on a power play--and Scott Thomas.

The Kings’ only real spark was lit by Stu Grimson, who avenged a blow by Colorado’s Chris Dingman that sent Nelson Emerson into the boards. Emerson suffered a concussion, Dingman got a two-minute penalty for boarding, and Grimson earned a few seconds of power-play time. That’s because he was sent on the ice to await Dingman’s emergence from the penalty box.

Dingman ended up with a headache, and Grimson was excused from the ice for 17 minutes in penalties.

Then the Kings went back to sleep.

Passmore faced 34 shots, many of them in arm’s-length range.

He had given up seven goals in his previous four games, no more than two in any of them.

Then he gave up two in the opening 9:42.

“They came out hard,” he said of Colorado. “Yeah, I was a little frustrated. We just didn’t play a good team game tonight.”