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O'Sullivan, LaBarbera lift Kings past Stars

Jan 13, 2008 - 1:57 AM By Craig Shultz PA SportsTicker Contributing Writer

LOS ANGELES (Ticker) -- Patrick O'Sullivan scored the decisive goal in the fourth round of the shootout and goaltender Jason LaBarbera stopped Mike Ribeiro as the Los Angeles Kings edged the Dallas Stars, 4-3, on Saturday.

After O'Sullivan beat netminder Marty Turco with a wrist shot to give the Kings the advantage in the bonus format, LaBarbera denied Ribeiro with a pad save to end the contest.

"I think you have to look at the goalie and what he does," O'Sullivan said. "That's why Turco's so difficult. You never know what he's going to do.

"That move is something I've done my whole life, something I've worked on before. A lot of guys in the league are shooting at that place. It's a tough place for the goalies to save."

LaBarbera said he thought he originally stopped Antti Miettinen, who forced the fourth round of the shootout.

"I thought I had him and he just kind of snuck it under," LaBarbera said. "I might have just opened up a little too much at the end there, and he put it under me."

LaBarbera quickly regrouped and stopped Ribeiro to preserve the win.

"I just tried to be patient," LaBarbera said. "The biggest thing is, I felt I was more patient this time than the last couple (shootouts) I was in. I tried to stay out more and wait for them to make their move. Ribeiro just cut across, and I stayed with him and got it with my blocker."

Alexander Frolov, Derek Armstrong and All-Star Anze Kopitar scored goals for Los Angeles, which defeated Dallas for the third time this season at Staples Center and only the fourth time in the last 15 meetings overall.

Dallas, however, started quickly against Los Angeles, which surrendered the game's first goal for the 14th time in its last 16 contests.

With rookie defenseman Jack Johnson and Jeff Giuliano in the penalty box for the Kings, Jeff Halpern gave the Stars a 1-0 lead, blasting a one-timer past LaBarbera.

Loui Eriksson scored 16 seconds later, when he gathered his own rebound, skated behind the net and wrapped the puck into the net at 3:36, shortly after the power play ended.

"I was feeling good at the start today," Eriksson said. "The first shift - one pass and one goal, that's a good start to build on. (But we gave up) too many 3-on-2s today, a lot of turnovers. We have to take care of that next game."

LaBarbera believed it was important to stay positive, despite the early deficit.

"When you get down two goals, before, I would be negative. You can't play that way," LaBarbera said. "The last two games, I tried to stay upbeat. I tried to stick with it and stay positive and not worry about what the score of the game was.

"It's nice that we came back right away and scored those two goals. Hopefully, I can take that mind set and keep going with it. Before, you kind of get discouraged and get down and realize you still have 55 minutes left in the game. I just tried to stick with it."

O'Sullivan acknowledged the team was frustrated by the early penalties.

"That's tough to start the game like that," O'Sullivan said. "Even though we were down, we felt confident (today), we knew how we had to play against this team. We beat them twice before in our building. We just tried to stick with our game plan, and it worked. We responded in the first period and got it tied up. I think we played a pretty patient game."

Los Angeles leveled the contest by scoring twice in 67 seconds.

Frolov redirected a shot by O'Sullivan past Turco at 9:06. O'Sullivan stepped out of the penalty box to take a pass from defenseman Brad Stuart before firing a shot from the left faceoff circle.

Armstrong leveled the game at 10:13, burying the rebound of a shot by Scott Thornton, who led a rush out of his own zone before shooting.

Los Angeles coach Marc Crawford praised his penalty killers.

"Very rarely do you have to kill two full minutes (of a 5-on-3), and very rarely do you have to kill off three in a night. We did it, we got through it," Crawford said. "My thought behind the bench was that we battled so hard here tonight and we faced such severe adversity, I was really hoping that the (shootout) shooters would do the job.

"We're going to continue to keep striving to eliminate our mistakes, but we'll never accept not having a strong work ethic. I thought the guys dug in their heels and worked hard, to a man. They showed a lot of backbone tonight."

Kopitar netted a power-play goal at 14:15 of the second period, skating in front of the net in time to get a piece of defenseman Rob Blake's shot and direct it past Turco.

"We scored a great power play goal," Crawford said. "It was an assertive hit, an assertive shot from the point and a real great job by Kopitar going to the net. Three good plays on the power play that resulted in a goal."

Blue-liner Matt Niskanen tied it at 3-3 just over seven minutes into the third period. With Dallas on a power play, Niskanen deflected Ribeiro's blast from just inside the blue line by LaBarbera for his fifth goal of the season.

"We've (played) too many games on the road, so from a coaching standpoint, we expected a sloppy game," Dallas coach Dave Tippett said. "But we still have to learn from the simple mistakes we're doing and figure out a way to score more goals."

Turco would not blame the fact the team was playing its fifth road game since January 2.

"It's more about things that are easily controlled. I'm talking about defense and checking and overall coverage stuff," Turco said. "That's certainly no excuse for not being able to make all the plays that we can. That's probably, for me, the most frustrating thing watching."