Warm Feelings All Around

Now, this was hockey weather.

A sunny day with temperatures in the 90s. A warm, velvet night.

Let Northeasterners keep their snow. Let fans in Calgary and Edmonton plug their cars into heaters to be sure the engines haven’t frozen by the time they leave the arena.

Palm trees and shirt sleeves and shorts ruled on Thursday.

So did the Kings.

Hockey returned to Southern California on Thursday after an 18-month absence as the Kings slogged through a 3-2 victory over the Phoenix Coyotes in their 2005-06 Staples Center opener. It was a long-awaited treat for fans and for Coach Andy Murray, who earned his 179th victory to top the Kings’ coaching list.

“What’s it been,” he said, smiling, “about two years since the last time we won a hockey game?”

For the record, it was March 14, 2004, a 5-1 rout of the Mighty Ducks. After that came an 11-game losing streak that dropped them from fourth to 10th in the conference, a lockout, and a season-opening loss at Dallas on Wednesday.

The Kings did show some grit and tenacity in the waning moments Thursday, but they got some unwitting help from the Coyotes and rookie Coach Wayne Gretzky.

Phoenix’s associate coaches, Barry Smith and Rick Tocchet, listed Fredrik Sjostrom among the players scratched from the lineup when they filled out the lineup card and listed Petr Nedved among the eligible skaters even though Nedved was nursing a groin injury. Gretzky signed the card but Smith said Gretzky “never did anything with it. It was chaotic. It was the associate coaches’ responsibility.”

When off-ice officials discovered the error, they declared Sjostrom an illegal player and sent him to the locker room, leaving the Coyotes with only 17 skaters and adding “double-check the lineup card” to Gretzky’s to-do list.

As a player, Gretzky was the greatest the game has ever seen. As a coach, he’s 0-2. “Bottom line is that it was my responsibility,” a subdued and sheepish Gretzky said. “There’s no one else to blame but me. It happened and it won’t happen again.”

The Kings’ first triumph of the season wasn’t a thing of beauty, but even the new NHL doesn’t award style points. The impact of the league’s new offense-friendly rules was difficult to discern Thursday, perhaps because both teams had played Wednesday and were too tired to capitalize on the room they’ve gained in the offensive zone and the freedom they have to skate without being hooked, held and grabbed.

More likely, though, the raggedness stemmed from the Kings’ inability to figure out what kind of team they are and what they want to be when they grow up.

Before Thursday’s game, Murray attributed his team’s early-season raggedness to an identity crisis and the consequences of throwing together a number of different personalities with different playing styles. “We were known as a pretty hard-working crew and tough to play against,” he said. “That was my mission statement since I’ve been here. I don’t think in the preseason we have been that, or in Dallas.”

If they haven’t figured out their identity yet, buy them a mirror. Or else they’ll be identified as a last-place team.

And get them a power-play quarterback.

It’s foolish to label anything a trend two days and 18 games into the NHL’s new era but it’s clear that power-play production will be crucial this season. At least while referees call obstruction as closely as they’ve been told to call it, which should be for the next month or until some influential general managers realize that their slow defensemen can’t keep up and start pressuring the league to let some hooking and holding creep back in.

Teams have averaged more than eight power plays a game in the first two days of the season, and the Kings and Coyotes each scored twice Thursday with an extra skater. Defensemen who can blast the puck from the point and forwards who can snap the puck quickly on net from the half-boards will be at a premium.

The sooner the Kings figure out who they are, the better off they’ll be. They shouldn’t have had so much trouble defeating the Coyotes, who figure to be among the Western Conference’s bottom-feeders and Thursday started their third-string goalie, David LeNeveu.

As fans left Staples Center they were given a miniature replica of the Stanley Cup. That may be the closest the Kings come to the Cup this season, but on the first Hockey Night in Los Angeles this season, hope was as warm and soothing as the hazy evening.