The Staples Center is a huge place. Expensive, too. It sits right in the middle of downtown Los Angeles, giving the area a sense of grandeur it hasn't had in some years.

	Ziggy Palffy and the Los Angeles Kings reign supreme at the Staples Center.

In all, an extravagant tribute to a team that has never won the Stanley Cup.

Yes, we're talking about those wacky Los Angeles Kings, which up until last month were considered the least inspiring of the building's three major tenants. Indeed, since Wayne Gretzky left to find his fortune in St. Louis (hah!) and New York (hah! Squared), the Kings had been cruising along beneath the radar, untroubled and untroubling.

Yet, now that the Lakers have gone into full decomposition mode and the Clippers have turned, well, full Clipper, the Kings are the only draw the old cavern has.

Then again, this happens every decade or so. The Kings made their one deep Cup run 10 years ago with Gretzky and a bunch of guys named Gary Shuchuk, or it seemed at the time. I mean, watch an ESPN Classic rerun of one of those games, and count how many times Gary Thorne says a name other than Gretzky. Or better yet, trust us. It's eight times.

This, while the Lakers were watching Michael Jordan do the playing and the saying, and the Clippers were in one of their profoundly awful cycles, the Kings were the talk of the Canadian part of town.

We won't relive those days, unless you are aching to see Barry Melrose's old badger-trap haircut again. But as we look at the standings this morning, we see the Kings in the midst of the Western Conference playoff jockeying.

The Lakers? Well, Kobe Bryant was on Monday Night Football explaining just how the hell it's gone so horrifically wrong, which is about as un-Lakerish as it gets. And the Clips? Michael Olowokandi was at a quilting bee in Covina, which is exactly as Clipper as it gets.

	The three-time defending champion Lakers are just 8-6 on their home court.

In the meantime, the Kings are grinding along, keeping the heads down, toiling for the good of hockey in general and themselves specifically. Better yet for them, they have won more than half their games, even after you count those bogus overtime losses as they really are, actual losses, rather than as the shameful mutant ties the league wants you to think they are.

In fact, they have sold out the building nine times already, a comparable figure to the Lakers' total of 14, and a very comparable total to the Clippers' one -- a game in November against, well, the Lakers.

Now if this sounds to you like a cheap attempt to shame the Lakers by comparing them to the Kings, well, take a Cohiba out of petty cash. That's exactly what it is. I mean, when Kobe Bryant has to schmooze Al Michaels, you know there's trouble afoot. For Bryant, it is supposed to work the other way around.

Of course, Jason Allison, Ziggy Palffy and Felix Potvin would crawl over a gravel trail from Edmonton with their shirts open to yuk it up with Al at halftime, but that's beside the point.

What isn't beside the point, however, is this. For the first time in years, Los Angeles looks like Denver -- swell hockey, un-swell basketball. And we are praising the Nuggets with faint damn here, because the Lakers haven't been that bad since the year before George Mikan turned up.

And that leaves the Staples Center as a hockey building, at least until further notice. It may be a temporary condition, but it's a condition nobody ever thought would be a condition at all, ever. After all, Gretzky is one of the very few great players of the last quarter century to retire and actually mean it, and he's busy trying to flog the dead Coyotes in Phoenix, so the Kings aren't even using star power to make their point.

Which is to say that Andy Murray isn't romantically linked with the Kings' owner's daughter -- at least as far as anyone knows.

But it's early yet, at least for that. The Staples Center has only been a hockey building for a few weeks now. Let's wait until Groundhog Day before we make any sweeping judgments.

Or next Thursday. Whichever comes first.

Ray Ratto is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com