Kings Take It to the Blank

The Kings earned a Christmas bonus Wednesday night.

Make that Christmas bonuses.

Goals from Jason Blake, Glen Murray, Garry Galley and Luc Robitaille earned them a 4-0 victory over Atlanta.

Bonus Time: Galley’s goal came on a power play, something that has been as rare at Staples Center as a cheap ticket.

Bonus Time II: The goals by Murray and Galley came in the second period, a time when recent King teams have been taking a siesta.

Bonus Time III: Robitaille’s goal was his first since coming back off the injured list, and it came in his third game. He had begun the season on a tear with seven goals in his first five games.

That all of this came at the hands of the Thrashers won’t be noted in the standings. They don’t separate points earned against expansion teams from those taken from teams with Stanley Cups in their trophy cases.

“I look at this as a bonus game,” Coach Andy Murray said. “We have a game in hand on pretty much everybody else.”

The bonus had a bonus. Many of the teams in the Western Conference race also played Wednesday night, and several of them lost. That made the win a bonus on top of a bonus, because there remains a game in hand. That it will be played Friday in Detroit at the beginning of a four-game trip is a bit of a bother, though.

“I don’t worry about the other teams,” Murray said. “I only worry about the team that’s ninth.”

Eight teams go to the playoffs.

One of them certainly won’t be the Thrashers, though you won’t find a coach who will admit it.

“This is the kind of game that scares a coach to death,” Murray said of playing Atlanta.

It needn’t have.

Blake’s goal took away some of the anxiety. He earned it by skating in from the end boards and batting his own rebound past Thrasher goalie Norm Maracle. It was Blake’s third goal of the season and eighth point. All of the goals and seven of the points have come in his last seven games, since his exile to Long Beach to learn how to pass.

Murray, the coach, has been concerned about what he calls “flat spots” in the Kings’ games of late, defining them as “times when we are outshot seven or eight to nothing.” It topped the agenda of a Monday meeting, and Murray, the winger, apparently was listening.

He rounded the flat spot and awakened the announced 15,210 at 2:39 of the second period when he won a wrestling match with Atlanta’s Gord Murphy in front of the crease and put in a rebound of his own deflection of a pass from Donald Audette.

That made it 2-0, and Galley’s goal added to that at 5:32.

It came with former King Ray Ferraro off the ice for goalie interference, and was the only King power-play goal since Nov. 14 that hadn’t been scored by Glen Murray.

The Kings were three for 47 on the power play until Galley’s goal, and they have been miserable at home for much of the season.

“It seemed that every time I thought we were going into a flat spot, we scored a goal,” Murray said.

From there, it was left to King goalie Jamie Storr, who faced only 21 shots, got plenty of help from his defense and was eyed enviously by his Atlanta counterpart.

Maracle, a Detroit castoff, was bombarded with 41 King shots, many of them from point-blank range and others so close that the 4-0 score was something of a, well, Maracle.

Storr’s shutout was his first of the season and seventh of his career, and it ran his record to 7-2-3. He has started 11 of the last 12 Kings’ games and faces an immediate future of starting a lot more, with goalie Stephane Fiset remaining sidelined because of injury.

“It was good because I know so many of those guys,” Storr said. “I was with Andrew Brunette for three years in junior, and I grew up with Matty [Johnson]. I played with Norm Maracle on some teams, and of course played with Ray Ferraro here.”

Robitaille’s goal came with 3:24 to play, when he backhanded a shot past Maracle, who was screened by a crowd. The puck glanced into the net off the skate of the Thrashers’ Andreas Karlsson on the Kings’ 41st shot of the game.

It was more than they have had all season, just another bonus to cap a night of bonuses.