KINGS NEED TO BE A TEAM AGAIN.

Byline: MATT McHALE NHL 

CALGARY - If the Kings want to make the playoffs, they need to stop talking about it.

Six weeks into the season, the Kings have five victories and the worst record in the Western Conference. Only the Atlanta Thrashers have fewer victories in the NHL.

But after embarrassing themselves last Saturday in a 4-2 loss at Detroit, the focus was on the 40-23 record the Kings probably will need the rest of the way to reach the postseason for the third consecutive year.

That's eight victories a month, two victories a week. If they score just three goals a game, well, they might just get those 92 points again. Phoenix will drop off. So will the Calgary Flames, whom the the Kings play tonight at the Olympic Saddledome.

All this chatter when they are playing as they might never win again.

The problem with the Kings so far isn't the won-loss record. It's that in the ultimate team sport, they have not become a team.

What they need up here in the Great White North is a night with a few 12-packs and a designated dog sled.

They need Jaroslav Modry to ask Jason Allison to tell his funniest Mike Keenan story. Maybe there are no funny Mike Keenan stories, but it doesn't matter. Tell the one about playing junior hockey in Sasketchewan when they got to the rink after a 12-hour bus ride and everyone's underwear was frozen.

Instead, the season is broken down into four 20-game increments. The first one ended Sunday night with a 2-2 tie in Minnesota. The record: 5-11-2-2. The next 20 starts tonight and eight of the first nine opponents are going to the playoffs.

Scouting reports and video sessions won't help if the Kings don't first learn what makes them tick.

It is clear that last year's run to within a game of the conference finals created an overwhelming expectation. Not only did they make the playoffs for the second year in a row after a dismal past, but they toppled mighty Detroit in an epic series. Then they took Stanley Cup champion Colorado to a seventh game.

Their slogan last year was ``Raise the Bar.'' But during their exhilarating run, it was raised too high. The only person who seemed to have last year in perspective was Adam Deadmarsh, who came over in the Blake deal.

``We won only one round,'' he said. ``There is a long way to go.''

With six weeks left last season, the Kings were 10 points from the final playoff spot. Felix Potvin had just joined the team and Rob Blake was on his way out. In Potvin's first game, he was smoked 6-0 in Edmonton.

Everyone had a good cry in the hotel lobby when Blake was shipped off to Colorado. But when Blake, the best player the organization ever produced, left, the team saw it had no choice but to come together.

Blake's season-long contract problems created an incredible distraction. Now he was gone. It still was a flawed team, but it was a team. The fellows moved mountains. Just six months later, the Kings are a amazingly different group, in body and in spirit.

Luc Robitaille took a huge free-agent payday and headed to Detroit. Allison was acquired from Boston in exchange for Jozef Stumpel and Glen Murray. Both moves were understandable, but the fallout has been a little tougher to explain.

The Kings had Robitaille penciled into the payroll at a skimpy $2.5 million. What they didn't factor were the goals he scored when no one else on the team could find the net. They weren't pretty goals that were part of an offensive scheme. They were the ugly ones he scored off skates and shoulder pads that the Kings have missed the most.

Allison brought an enormous pedigree: 40 goals, 95 points last season in Boston, where he was the captain. And this would not be better if Stumpel and Murray were here. But the move broke up the Kings' most productive line and Bryan Smolinski, one of the cornerstones of last year's surge, hasn't been the same since.

The moves make sense long term, but now it looks as if the team moved too fast to improve something that wasn't completely there.

There are 62 games remaining this season, but the only one that matters is tonight. What happens in early April won't matter unless they come together now. One thing that is certain: Teams rarely make up 10 points virtually overnight the way the Kings did last year.

Hockey is a numbers game, but the players are not accountants.

There is a old drinking song in Minnesota that has the line, ``There is hockey in my blood and blood in my hockey.''

Start singing, boys.

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By Matt McHale

SATHER'S STRATEGY

Eric Lindros' successful comeback with the first-place Rangers (12 goals, 21 points) after six concussions has been helped by protection GM Glen Sather has employed in New York. Tough guys Sandy McCarthy, Dale Purinton and former King Sean McKenna play a similar role for Lindros that Marty McSorley, Dave Semenko and Dave Brown played for Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier on Sather's Edmonton Oilers.

TRICK OR TREAT

After missing 13 games recovering from arthroscopic knee surgery, Pittsburgh's Alexei Kovalev had back-to-back hat tricks against the New Jersey Devils and the New York Islanders. To that point, the Penguins had gone four consecutive games and eight of nine without scoring more than two goals. Nobody in NHL history has scored three consecutive hat tricks. In the Penguins' next game, they beat Kovalev's former team, the Rangers, 1-0 in overtime. Against the Islanders, who are slumping after a fast start, Kovalev scored three goals in 5 1/2 minutes.

MEMORIES OF ROY

Calgary's Craig Conroy isn't surprised Colorado goaltender Patrick Roy had his third consecutive shutout Sunday, a 2-0 victory over New Jersey. Conroy remembers Roy's competitive fire when they were teammates in Montreal. In the first practice of Conroy's first training camp, he tried to clear the puck, but somehow it struck Roy in the head. ``Patrick stopped the whole practice, cleaned his crease and then came out,'' Conroy said recently. ``I said, 'I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry.' Then he punched me right in the forehead with his blocker.''

MEMORIES OF ROY

With 17 assists this season, Carolina's Ron Francis now has 1,154 and trails Ray Bourque by 15 for second place on the all-time list. Amazingly, Francis is 809 assists behind Gretzky for the top spot. He has a much better chance of catching former King Marcel Dionne (1,771 points) for fourth on the all-time points list. Francis needs 127 and at age 38 he will have to play through next season. But most players his age have been resigned to checking lines. Francis leads the Hurricanes' top scoring unit.

TREVOR RETURNS

Last week, the Vancouver Canucks made a huge deal, reacquiring Trevor Linden from the Washington Capitals. They didn't do it for the scoring. Linden, once a regular 30-goal man, has just one goal and four points. But he was the Canucks' former captain, is a physical presence and a top faceoff man. Within a day of the trade, the Canucks sold 3,000 tickets. Vancouver is on the hook for $1.8 million of Linden's $4 million this year. Washington and Montreal, where he played two years, are paying the rest.

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