At Last, Ducks Looking Up : Hockey: Anaheim beats San Jose, 6-3, and starts thinking about getting out of the cellar.

Catching the San Jose Sharks in the standings last season probably would have meant making the Stanley Cup playoffs.

This season, it could mean escaping last place in the Pacific Division, and the Mighty Ducks gained on San Jose with a 6-3 victory Thursday night.

San Jose is still two points ahead, but the last-place Ducks are on the way up, with seven points in their last seven games. The Sharks have lost eight of their last 12, and Thursday’s defeat was their seventh in a row at home, though another sellout crowd of 17,190 greeted them enthusiastically at San Jose Arena.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Duck Coach Ron Wilson said. “It seemed like we were on the wrong escalator. We were going up the down escalator. We were moving our feet like crazy. Now it seems like someone pushed the emergency stop.”

The Ducks couldn’t beat San Jose last season to save their skins--or the pride of Duck General Manager Jack Ferreira, who started the Shark franchise but didn’t make it to the second season before being fired because of front-office politics.

Winless in six games against the Sharks last season--including a devastating 6-0 loss in the final meeting of the season--the Ducks have won the first two games this season by a combined score of 12-6.

“It’s night and day compared to last year,” forward Joe Sacco said. “I don’t know what it is.”

The game didn’t look like a matchup between the two lowest-scoring teams in the Western Conference, but it was.

It could have been a more lopsided victory, but the Sharks scored two goals 25 seconds apart in the third period, inspiring Wilson to call a timeout at 11:24.

His team also failed to score on a 2-on-1 rush and then on a 2-on-0 during the first period, with Sacco and Garry Valk missing yet another opportunity in already frustrating seasons for them both.

But Sacco broke a 16-game scoring drought with a goal that made the score 6-1 midway through the third period.

Defenseman Bobby Dollas had made it 5-1 nine seconds into the third on a long shot. Dollas also had two assists, and his three-point game extended his point streak to seven games.

“He’s not trying to be Bobby Orr. He’s trying to be Bobby Dollas,” Wilson said.

Rookie Paul Kariya extended his point streak to eight games with a second-period assist, his 14th point in the last eight games and 25th of the season.

Other rookies made increasingly big contributions. Steve Rucchin, an obscure Canadian college player last season who was a longshot to play pro hockey at all, scored two goals, one on a well-executed two-on-one with Peter Douris. It was Rucchin’s second two-goal game, and gives him five goals this season. Valeri Karpov, who was expected to get second billing to Kariya this season after being the second-leading scorer during the exhibition season, got off to a disappointing start and spent a short stint in the minors, but he seems to have found his confidence and scored his third goal of the season, his second in two games.

The Sharks aren’t the team they were last season, when they reached the second round of the playoffs. For one thing, the flashy line of Igor Larionov, Sergei Makarov and Johan Garpenlov has been disbanded. Garpenlov has been traded, Larionov has been out all month with a broken foot, and Makarov, with a mere nine points, has been scratched the last four games.