Murray Wants Team to Help Itself First

Sure there’s scoreboard-watching. But at the end of the day, it’s an exercise in futility, because no team is going onto the ice with the idea of helping anybody but itself.

“The bottom line is that we have to do ourselves a favor by winning games,” Coach Andy Murray said.

Murray expected the Mighty Ducks to defeat Detroit at the Pond on Sunday night. They did.

He expected Calgary to defeat Edmonton. It did.

He expects Vancouver to win every time it plays.

“We’ve got to win our own games, and if we do that, we stay ahead of our opposition,” he said. “I assume they are always going to win.”

And when he’s wrong, when they lose, “it doesn’t make a bit of difference to me,” he said.

It’s the attitude he’s trying to transmit to the Kings for their final 10 regular-season games.

It’s a simple math problem. They are in fifth place in the West, two points ahead of Phoenix, three ahead of Edmonton, five ahead of San Jose.

More important, they are seven ahead of the Ducks, their opponent Tuesday night at Staples Center.

Murray’s mandate when he took the job in June was to earn a playoff spot, so for now, the teams he has to worry about are the Ducks, Calgary and Vancouver.

A playoff seeding comes later.

“I want us to stay where we are [in the standings] or get better, but mainly I want us in the playoffs,” he said.

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The Kings are 12-3-3-1 against the teams in places 9-13 in the West, which is the kind of record needed to make the playoffs. They have fared poorly against the Ducks, going 0-1-2. They have defeated the Ducks only once in the last two seasons.