Kings extend points streak to 8 games but fall to Penguins in OT

LOS ANGELES — The Kings’ recipe for success this season had been simple: hit the road and shove Cam Talbot between the pipes.

Thursday, they started a four-game stretch at Crypto.com Arena and went to backup Pheonix Copley after Talbot made five straight starts since relieving Copley in Arizona on Oct. 27, and veering from the script proved problematic as they fell to the Pittsburgh Penguins, 4-3, in overtime.

Carl Grundstrom, Adrian Kempe and Kevin Fiala scored for the Kings, who extended their points streak to eight consecutive games (6-0-2) but saw their four-game winning streak come to an end. Copley stopped 16 of 20 shots, in step with his sub-.800 save percentage this season. Anze Kopitar moved into second on the Kings’ career points list (1,155) with an assist on Grundstrum’s first-period goal.

Sidney Crosby spearheaded Pittsburgh’s attack with a goal and an assist on Jake Guentzel’s marker. Lars Eller also scored a goal before Bryan Rust deposited the OT winner. Magnus Hellberg stopped 34 shots in his first start of the season.

Sixty minutes proved insufficient and the game moved to overtime despite the Kings nearly doubling up the Penguins in shots on goal. The Kings initially avoided a sudden-death goal when Rust had a goal disallowed after he was determined to have entered the offensive zone offside. That merely delayed the firing squad, as Rust scored on a wraparound with 1:15 to go in the extra session.

To reach overtime, with 13:20 remaining in regulation time, the Kings drew even off a tenacious play that saw four players crash the net, three hit it with shots in a three-second span and Fiala score his second goal of the season with the final followup bid.

A mere 37 seconds into the third period, the Kings found themselves chasing the game again. Though the Kings had three men back against Pittsburgh’s three attackers, Crosby managed to thread a pass across at least four bodies that found Guentzel’s blade for a tip-in that made it 3-2.

With just under two minutes left in the second period, the Penguins set up a feverish final 20 minutes with a tying goal. Eller stripped Fiala and blasted off in transition. He danced across the slot, beating Fiala and Drew Doughty, and lifted a shot over Copley to knot the score.

Kempe gave the Kings their first edge of the evening with a goal-scorer’s goal off a wrist shot high to the short side from the left faceoff dot. Kempe’s sixth goal extended his scoring streak to eight games over which he has compiled 12 points. Quinton Byfield extended his own string to five games (eight points) with a secondary assist, while Mikey Anderson’s wizardry on the zone entry was performed against four Pittsburgh defenders. Anderson’s eighth point of the season put him on track to incinerate his career high of 20 last year.

The Kings made it a fresh game with one second remaining on the game’s first penalty. Kopitar skated down a Matt Roy dump-in and drew Erik Karlsson to him just as he dished the puck to a wide-open Grundstrom, who knifed the puck through Hellberg’s five hole for a short-handed redirection goal at 14:14. The assist, the 755th of Kopitar’s career, leaves him two away from tying Marcel Dionne’s franchise record.

There was a physical edge to the first period, with Kings defenseman Andreas Englund lighting up Radim Zohorna like a neon sign as he tried to cut toward the middle and Kempe delivering a gloved jab to the face of Evgeni Malkin during a scrum.

At the 7:11 mark of the first period, fittingly, Pittsburgh’s fortunes improved. A give-and-go play between Crosby and Kris Letang petered out but left Crosby with the puck at the side of the net, where his inventiveness turned a broken play into the game’s first goal. He played the puck to himself off one side of the net and then jammed home a backhanded wraparound on the other. The goal extended Crosby’s point streak to seven games and moved him into a tie with Mike Modano and the Kings’ own Luc Robitaille for the ninth-most goals in NHL history with a single franchise (557).