Kings Won’t Reach for Stars

King Coach Andy Murray’s eyes widened as he opened the door and saw a larger-than-usual media assembly in his office Wednesday.

“Holy smokes,” he said.

Later, goalie Jamie Storr looked around the locker room and wondered, “What’s with all the reporters?”

The deal is, the Kings matter again. They made themselves relevant last season by going 13-2-5-2 to finish the season, then upending the Detroit Red Wings and pushing the Colorado Avalanche to seven games in the Stanley Cup playoffs.

How will they stand up to the scrutiny?

They open their season tonight at Staples Center amid the tricky combination of increased expectations and diminished star power.

For the previous six seasons, winning a single playoff game would have represented a step in the right direction. Now, nothing short of a trip to the conference finals can be considered progress.

And ever since 1986 the Kings had either Luc Robitaille or Rob Blake--and usually both--on their roster. If nothing else, they served the same purpose as a favorite old photograph, something reassuring to look at if things weren’t going well.

This year’s squad might have some familiar names (including a Robitaille, only this one is Randy), but don’t expect to see many of these faces to be skating at Staples Center for the All-Star game on Feb. 2. This is not a team of stars.

They promise you’ll like them for the right reasons: They’re a hard-working bunch of good guys. But an abundance of talent is almost a necessity in the pros. Over the course of an 82-game season, you need some nights when you can afford to coast and still pick up a victory. And in the playoffs, when the shifts are longer and matchups play an even larger role, the best players seem to stand out even more.

The Kings’ margin for error is so thin, they’ll have to work hard every night.

“We can beat the [top] teams,” center Bryan Smolinski said. “But at the same time, we can lose to Nashville, lose to Columbus.”

Or maybe even the Phoenix Coyotes, tonight’s opponent. The Coyotes no longer have Keith Tkachuk or Jeremy Roenick. Their biggest name, Wayne Gretzky, is in the owner’s box. They’re a group of hustling kids who only a coach could love.

“It would be a fun team to coach,” Murray said.

He might have the next best thing.

“You look at Phoenix and ourselves, we’re very similar teams,” Smolinski said.

That’s a little scary, since the Coyotes are some people’s pick for the worst team in the Western Conference. No one has said the Kings resemble the Avalanche, Red Wings or Dallas Stars.

Some big names moved around the league this summer, including Jaromir Jagr, Alexei Yashin, Eric Lindros, Brett Hull, Pierre Turgeon and Doug Weight. None were ever seriously mentioned in connection with the Kings.

Detroit went into the off-season looking as if it was going to have to surrender the title of Hockeytown. The Red Wings looked old and injury-prone and there were questions about whether legendary Coach Scotty Bowman would return. Then they went out and got Robitaille and goaltender Dominik Hasek and now they’re ready to make another run at the Cup.

Dallas, St. Louis and San Jose--all teams that would have ranked ahead of the Kings anyway--made major moves to get even stronger.

All Colorado did was shell out $100 million to retain the nucleus of the team that won the Stanley Cup last season. They have to be considered contenders even if Peter Forsberg misses the season while recovering from the emergency spleen removal he had done after they beat the Kings in Game 7 last season.

After all, they were good enough to win the last two rounds of the playoffs without him.

It’s not just the point production that the Kings will miss from Robitaille. He had become the face of the franchise, through media and community appearances.

Ziggy Palffy has the skills on the ice and is one of the top scorers in the league, but he shies away from the spotlight. Adam Deadmarsh, acquired from Colorado in the Rob Blake trade last season, is a winner and a gritty player, but he hasn’t been around long enough to have an identity as a King.

So don’t expect a solo singer out front. This team is more like the Temptations than Diana Ross and the Supremes.

It will be Ian Laperriere here, maybe Philippe Boucher or Smolinski there.

“There’s a lot of personalities,” Smolinski said. “There’s not one guy that’s going to take it. It’s going to be different every night.”

Their choice for captain, defenseman Mattias Norstrom, underscores that point.

“I’m not that [all-star] kind of player,” Norstrom said. “That’s maybe the whole purpose of why I became captain, because I represent what our team has become now.

“Sure, we have an all-star player in Ziggy Palffy, but the rest of our team is kind of a group thing. For sure, a player like myself as captain really emphasizes that.”

To Murray, “Matty Norstrom is a King. He’s an example of what you want a Kings’ player to be. He’s dedicated to his profession, he’s well respected by his teammates. He’s our leader off-ice, in the weight room. He’s our leader in drills on-ice. He never takes a drill off, he never takes a shift off.”

With Murray, it keeps coming back to team, system, system, team.

“We think we’re pretty well balanced,” Murray said. “We don’t have what most people on the outside would [call] that bona-fide star player. In some ways, that maybe lends itself to creating a situation where we have to be more of a team. We have to have everybody contributing to be successful.

“We obviously lost some goals in Luc Robitaille, and we have to make up for that. But more importantly, we want to be better defensively this year than we were last year.”

If they are better defensively, it should alleviate one of the top questions about this team: Can Felix Potvin duplicate his outstanding goaltending from last season? The Kings hope he doesn’t have to, that the opponents’ scoring opportunities will diminish and he merely needs to be good instead of great.

Ultimately, that should be all we expect of the Kings as well. Good but not great. They didn’t keep up in the talent race over the summer, so they’ll have to step up just to match last season’s performance.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com.