Palffy Principle: Game’s the Thing

The game was against Colorado, which merely has the best goaltender in the history of the league, statistics tell us.

Ziggy Palffy had given the Kings a 4-3 lead, which they had promptly blown on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, and he had the puck again on the right wing with 22 seconds to play in the second period.

Patrick Roy slid across the crease to meet Palffy’s challenge.

The target was about four inches square.

In stride, Palffy put a three-inch puck through it, a Robin Hood shot that incensed Roy, who figured he had closed all the windows and cursed what he saw as outrageous fortune that allowed Palffy to find a crack.

It gave the Kings a 5-4 lead in a game they eventually won, 6-4.

It was Palffy being Palffy.

“It’s just knowing what Patrick does and where Patrick is,” says Bryan Smolinski, who has seen Palffy as a New York Islander teammate and who made the trek to the Kings with him in a 1999 trade.

Smolinski says he is no longer surprised by anything Palffy does.

“He knows if Patrick is coming across the ice, he’s got to go top shelf [into the top of the net],” Smolinski analyzes. “He knows he’s got to get it over [Roy’s] shoulder.”

Knowing it and doing it are two vastly different things.

“That’s why some guys get 15 goals and some guys get 30 and 40,” Smolinski says, shrugging.

It’s why Palffy leads the league with 18 goals in 26 games. It’s why he leads the NHL with 40 points. And it’s why he’s off to his best start.

“He’s turned his game up,” says Smolinski, who rejects the idea that Palffy is doing something new, since “he scored 40 three times on the Island.”

But Smolinski and Dave Taylor, the Kings’ senior vice president and general manager, point out why Palffy is different from the rest.

“I played with some good forwards, with [Wayne] Gretzky and [Marcel] Dionne, and they were able to do the same thing he does,” Taylor says. “They could shoot and make plays on the move.”

Says Smolinski: “Nothing surprises me about this kid. I mean, you have a couple of wows once in a while.

“Like in Boston, I pick a pass off and look at the net and think where I would shoot. He just throws it top shelf from the circle. He’s thinking while he’s in the act. Not many guys can do it. As opposed to just grabbing the puck and pounding it, like most guys would do, he places it.”

And Palffy is placing it better than he ever has, perhaps frustratingly so because he is nearing potential that can never be realized. You score 40 goals, which he has three times, and there will be those who ask, “Why not 50?”

Score 50 and the demand will be for 60.

Win a playoff game, and the demand will be to win a series, a conference title, a Stanley Cup. Two. Three. There will always be those who want more. Those who say that the only things keeping him from higher numbers, higher profile and greater achievement are a headline, a television interview.

Acclaim.

Palffy’s response is simple. The easiest way to avoid the limelight is to make the limelight avoid you.

“This is my hobby, this is my work, this is my life, this is my everything,” he says of hockey, just before he disappears behind a wall in a gated community in Manhattan Beach with fiancee Zora and dog Aida after the day’s work is done.

No trespassing.

It’s not that he’s off-putting. There is a genuine warmth to the personality, emotions that spill onto the ice in a game-long rant of English and Slovakian that sometimes melds into gibberish. There’s a sense of humor in telling a teammate that he recognizes the dog walking into the training facility on a leash.

“He looks like you,” Palffy says.

It’s just that hockey is quite enough, thank you.

“If you have a lot of concentration on you as a person, you’re getting more pressure,” says Palffy. “A lot of people expect things of you. They expect things every game, that you have to score, and it’s not going to work like that. Particularly if you’re going to be thinking about pressure, if you’re going to think about being in the paper and on TV. I think it can be good for some people, but it doesn’t work like that for me.”

It’s pure Catch-22. It’s easier to score if nobody expects you to. When you show you can score, everybody expects you to.

With scoring comes acclaim, coveted by some.

Not by Palffy.

Endorsements? Go ask Rob Blake or Luc Robitaille or Jamie Storr.

Palffy plays hockey, and if nobody is asking him to sell cars or soft drink or dog food or potato chips, well, he’s earning $5 million a year from his evening job and that’s not too bad.

“I think I’m a different guy with a different personality,” he says. “I just want to do what I know, not do what I don’t know. I think I would be a different guy if I was on TV all the time. That’s not me. I’m happy with my life. That can be for somebody else.”

Getting Palffy was supposed to give the Kings a player to promote to sell tickets at their new building, Staples Center. It’s the Hollywood way, you know, but instead it gave them a player who could quietly help them win.

Palffy had never won with the Islanders. His regular-season statistics had drawn some attention, but the measure of a player’s value to a hockey team is what happens between the regular season and Stanley Cup finals. Palffy had played in the World Championships, a tournament largely contested by players who have finished their seasons.

He wanted to win in the NHL and saw the Kings as an opportunity to do that.

They got him into his first playoff game, last season against Detroit, and he scored two goals in a series in which the Kings scored only six.

The season was also a learning process. Mainly, he learned that it was different with the Kings, that he didn’t have to score every goal.

Palffy finished with 27--and 39 assists--in 66 games.

The realization that he wasn’t alone on the ice is part of the reason he is alone atop the league’s scoring.

“Since last year, I don’t feel the pressure here,” Palffy says. “There are a lot of players who score 20-30 goals a year here, so I get a lot of help.

“When you have better players around you, it’s easier to score. . . . You need a good pass to score a goal.”

Apparently, there have been many good passes, because he has many goals.

“[Being on top of the scoring list] means a lot because I’ve worked hard for it,” he says. “It means I’m doing something right. And we’re doing something right. . . . Having Lucky [Robitaille] close behind me is another thing. Having two players near the top is a positive thing for the team.”

Robitaille is fifth in the NHL with 34 points.

When they are on the ice together, as they are on the King power play, it’s difficult to make one a target. That’s why so many of their points--eight of Palffy’s 18 goals and 13 of his 22 assists; and four of Robitaille’s 13 goals and 11 of his 21 assists--have come on the power play.

But at even strength, they are on different lines and both are targets.

The Rangers did everything but put a bounty on Palffy in Madison Square Garden a week ago, the theory being that hitting him hard and often enough would make him back off.

Palffy responded with three goals in the Kings’ 7-6 loss. He also almost took Ranger captain Mark Messier’s hands off with a nonpenalized slash.

The Mighty Ducks sent defenseman Vitaly Vishnevski at him on Sunday night, and Palffy was held pointless for only the fifth time this season.

Perhaps the jury is still out on pounding Palffy.

“I’ve run into this before,” he says. “Look, I don’t mind if somebody hits me clean. I can stand up for myself. Some guys don’t like to take hits. I think it’s part of the game. I can take it and I can give it too.”

But he plainly would rather not.

“I play hockey because I love this game,” he says. “I started when I was a little guy, and I wasn’t thinking then that I’m going to make money from this. . . . I don’t want to be somebody else. I think people should stick with what they do best, what they do well.”

He’s played hockey uncommonly well this season, and for the Kings, that’s enough.

SLAP SHOTS

The $87-million saga of Gretzky and Steve Ellman taking over the Phoenix franchise from Richard Burke should finally end with a vote of the NHL’s Board of Governors on Monday. Problem: Gretzky wants to sign goalie Nikolai Khabibulin, lenders want him on a tight budget and the two don’t mix.

Don’t get too excited about an Eric Lindros-to-Toronto deal. That’s mostly fan talk and media hype. Satisfying Philadelphia General Manager Bobby Clarke won’t be easy. The Kings’ Taylor, by the way, still says he wants to talk with Lindros’ representatives.