Galley Struggles With Lesser Role

His uniform is a black suit, white shirt and a Yogi Bear-Huckleberry Hound tie, which has nothing to do with the new haberdashery the Kings are wearing this season.

Garry Galley is caught in the middle, not wanting to say anything that will muddy personal and team waters, but also not ready to accept that, at 35, he is becoming a part-time player.

“I’m shocked,” he said of being scratched for the second straight game Monday in Vancouver. “I thought there would be games I wouldn’t play, but I thought they would be later in the season. To start the season off like this is hard.”

Galley, a defenseman, was scratched from the lineup five times last season.

“But those were games to give me a rest,” he said.

Galley, who returned to the Kings last season as a free agent after a 10-year sojourn through Washington, Boston, Philadelphia and Buffalo, is a victim of a numbers game, and the numbers in this case are 8 and 28. That’s 8, as in Doug Bodger and 28 as in Steve Duchesne, off-season defenseman pickups by the Kings.

“[Coach] Larry [Robinson] has told me it’s nothing I’ve done,” Galley said. “I had a good training camp. I guess now it’s my job to get ready to play an 80-game season.”

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King center Ian Laperriere suffered a twisted knee and did not play in the third period. His injury will be evaluated today. . . . Unsigned defenseman Aki Berg played for his TPS team in Finland on Saturday, the day after the NHL season opened. That makes him effectively lost to the Kings this season. . . . Yanic Perreault on scoring three goals in the first two games: “It helps I’m playing on a good offensive line. Luc [Robitaille] and [Vladimir] Tsyplakov make a real difference.”