John Gibson to start in goal, Dany Heatley out for Ducks vs. Avalanche

Greetings from Denver, where the Ducks held an optional morning skate as they prepared to face the Colorado Avalanche Sunday night in the finale of a four-game trip. The Ducks are 2-1 so far, with wins at Chicago and Dallas and a loss at St. Louis. The Avalanche, which lost in a shootout Saturday at St. Louis, is 1-0-3 in its last four games.

A little more than an hour before their game against Colorado on Sunday, the Ducks announced that goaltender Frederik Andersen had experienced “minor leg tightness” and that Jason LaBarbera had been recalled from Norfolk (Va.) of the American Hockey League as a precaution to back up John Gibson.

A club spokesman also said that defenseman Bryan Allen was summoned to join the team in Denver but has not been officially added to the roster. He has been in Norfolk on a long-term conditioning assignment.

Coach Bruce Boudreau also indicated that left wing Dany Heatley, who didn’t dress for the Ducks’ victory at Dallas on Friday, again won’t be in the lineup. He played two games after returning from a preseason groin injury.

“He’s healthy enough to play but he’s not as ready as he’d want to be and that will come,” Boudreau said.

With defenseman Mark Fistric getting treatment in Anaheim for a lower-back injury, the Ducks will again start a defense corps with four of six players aged 23 or younger. Hampus Lindholm is 20, Sami Vatanen is 23, Josh Manson is 23, and Cam Fowler will be 23 next month. The old guys are Clayton Stoner, 29, and Francois Beauchemin, 34.

It used to be that few young defensemen could win and keep regular NHL jobs and immediately become impact players. Hockey fans in Southern California have seen a few exceptional defensemen break that rule, with Fowler and Kings defenseman Drew Doughty quickly becoming core players for their respective teams. Lindholm and Vatanen are doing the same thing.

“Jay Leach always told me when I first got to the NHL, defensemen need at least 300 NHL games to know the game,” Ducks Coach Bruce Boudreau said, speaking of the former NHL player who was Boudreau’s assistant coach in Washington. “Our guys have done it on a little quicker curve.”

Boudreau said the young defensemen “sort of had baptism by fire. I think it’s helped them progress by just playing in the division against some of the teams they’ve had to play against, to get better. Because if they didn’t get better they would have fallen off pretty quickly, as our team would have. The learning curve was a lot sharper than just gradual.”

Beauchemin agreed that his 20-something teammates have proved to be precocious. He said that when he was 20, he wasn’t nearly as good as Lindholm, his defense partner.

“I was in the American League at his age,” Beauchemin said. “Obviously we’re different types of players. He’s one of those guys that skates like the wind and moves the puck well. He reads the play really good and when you play with young guys like that, the most important thing is just to communicate really good with him, especially in the defensive zone. Making reads, making sure we know where everybody is.”

Beauchemin also said the Ducks’ young defensemen have several qualities in common that are helping them succeed in an ever-faster league.

“Just their confidence. They really go out there and play well with the puck and all of them can really skate, and they’re using that to their advantage,” he said. “I think it’s the key right now in the NHL, if you have a good skating ability and can escape from guys and move the puck quick and jump up in the play.”

One more note: The Ducks’ penalty killers were 12 for 12 in the first three games of this trip, bringing the team’s success rate to 85.4%, ninth in the NHL through Saturday’s games. Boudreau called the penalty-killing success “an inspirational thing,” and credited the faceoff dexterity of new additions Ryan Kesler and Nate Thompson and the skills of Ryan Getzlaf for making a difference.

“Kesler and Thompson and Getzlaf give us ability to win the faceoff and get control and get it down and lose that first 20, 25 seconds. It’s something that we never really had last year,” Boudreau said. “We’d lose possession and they’d start with the puck in our zone. Starting with the puck is so important we’ve used a lot of different guys....There are a lot of different guys here that know how to kill penalties.”