Ducks Take No Chances, 6-3 : Hockey: After three consecutive one-goal losses, they don’t allow the Canucks to catch up.

It wasn’t the first Vancouver homecoming for the Mighty Ducks’ Ron Wilson, Anatoli Semenov and Garry Valk.

But it was the first happy one.

The Ducks, coming off three consecutive one-goal losses, scored a season-high six goals, then held off the Vancouver Canucks for a 6-3 victory before 15,550 at the Pacific Coliseum on Friday night.

At this point, any victory would have been emotional for the Ducks, but this one was particularly so for Coach Ron Wilson, a former Vancouver assistant coach, and for Semenov and Valk, both of whom were Canucks last season and scored a goal in this game.

The other standout was goaltender Ron Tugnutt, who made 44 saves in his first start in two weeks.

It was the Ducks’ fifth victory of the season, their second road victory. Their seven one-goal losses in 20 games this season included a 3-2 loss to Vancouver on Sunday in which the Ducks led with five minutes remaining before giving up two goals 92 seconds apart, one of them while the Ducks were on a power play.

This time, they took a 5-2 lead into the third, and gave up a goal to Trevor Linden before Joe Sacco helped seal the victory with a breakaway goal at 9:55 of the third.

The Ducks took a 2-0 lead in the first five minutes on goals by right wing Todd Ewen--his third of the season--and by Semenov, who his seventh. He reached his team-leading 21st point by adding two assists.

Semenov’s goal came after he picked up an errant Canuck pass in the slot and shot it high and wide, only to see it come back off the glass and then into the goal off defenseman Gerald Diduck.

The goal extended Semenov’s point streak to nine games.

Vancouver twice cut the lead to one goal. Geoff Courtnall scored the Canucks’ first goal after Tugnutt got a good piece of Courtnall’s shot from the left side, only to see it roll in anyway.

The Ducks’ were leading, 3-1, in the second period after defenseman Randy Ladouceur’s first goal of the season when Cliff Ronning made the score 3-2.

But Semenov and Douris mounted a two-on-one rush that ended with a rebound goal by Douris, and Valk’s power-play goal made the score 5-2.

Tugnutt was sharp, even though he was making his first start since Nov. 5, when he lasted less than six minutes in a loss to the New Jersey Devils before being pulled with the Ducks trailing, 4-0.

Instead of getting a chance to recover from that outing a few days later, he saw his next start postponed when he suffered a strained neck in practice the morning of a Nov. 9 game against Dallas. Guy Hebert’s good play and the presence of rookie goaltender Mikhail Shtalenkov conspired to make Tugnutt’s wait stretch to two weeks.

Before the game, he said he wasn’t too worried about overcoming the layoff.

“I’ve got enough experience now I can rise above it,” Tugnutt said. “It’s not like I’m a first-year kid trying to see if I can make it in the league.

“That happened to me before, against St. Louis, my first year. I got barraged early, four goals in the first period, and I was sent down the next day. I figured maybe I couldn’t play in the league, all these things went through my head. But I came back and I’ve been in the league seven years. I’m not about to lose confidence in myself now.”

Duck Notes

The Mighty Ducks have won only three of their last 14 games, but assistant general manager said the front office is not pushing hard to improve the team through a trade. “We’re not looking to do anything. We still think we can improve with what we’ve got,” Pierre Gauthier said. “We feel confident with our club. Most first-year teams get in that mode where they make trades right and left and make a lot of changes. . . . We’d like to keep stability coming outing of the chute.” . . . Defenseman Mark Ferner sat out a second consecutive game because of groin injury and was replaced in the lineup by David Williams. . . . The officials who replaced striking NHL referees and linesmen were referee Mike Rebus, a Canadian college and junior hockey official, and linesmen Dave McClellan and Dave Shaw, both of whom have worked in juniors.