Ducks Are Just Mighty Frustrated Now : Hockey: Patience with struggling veterans wanes after 5-2 loss at Dallas, the seventh in nine games.

Patience, the Mighty Ducks’ management is still saying, but now they’re saying it through clenched teeth.

“It’s very frustrating, very, very frustrating,” General Manager Jack Ferreira said Thursday night at Reunion Arena after the Ducks’ 5-2 loss to Dallas--their seventh defeat in nine games this season.

“People better wake up or we’ll go with all rookies,” Coach Ron Wilson said of such players as veterans Joe Sacco and Bob Corkum, who don’t have a goal between them. “I’m not impatient with the younger guys. I want a few veterans to show up. All they get is heavy minuses and no points, hardly any shots on goal.

“Guys say they don’t have confidence, but how can the coaching staff be confident in people when they’re minus, minus, minus. It’s not Oleg Tverdovsky, not Paul Kariya. It’s the same damn guys who are minus night in and night out, not producing any points.”

The strain is showing, and it’s intensified because the players failing the Ducks are the ones Ferreira put his confidence in as the few “keepers” from the 1993 expansion draft.

“Some guys aren’t playing up to what they’ve done in the past,” Ferreira said.

Once he wouldn’t part with them, and now he might find it hard to give them away, much less get a player who can help turn around the Ducks’ season. Just about every time a trade is announced elsewhere, it gets harder to imagine how the Ducks haven’t done something, any little thing, to improve a team that has scored two goals or fewer in six of its nine games.

“It’s not that I’m not on the phones. I’m on every day,” Ferreira said. “But if they want somebody, it’s 8, 9 or 10.” Those are the jerseys worn by rookie Chad Kilger, Kariya and Tverdovsky.

“Patience,” Ferreira said. “You look for the right opportunity, the right deals.”

Wilson has grown impatient with bad penalties, particularly the one defenseman Dave Karpa took after the first period expired, when he was called for high-sticking in a scuffle with Todd Harvey.

The score was tied, 1-1, the Ducks had just played a determined and lively first period and killed off a five-on-three power play.

Karpa put them back on a five on three to start the second and the Stars still had a man advantage when Harvey finished off a tic-tac-toe play with a shot from the slot, assisted by Mike Modano and Dave Gagner.

“That’s the breaks sometimes, you know, it’s part of the game,” said Karpa, who tangled with Harvey once earlier in the game. “We killed the five on three and the period’s over, then all of a sudden he starts coming at me. I put up my hand to protect myself. I don’t agree with this penalty.”

Karpa is known for goading other players into penalties but avoiding getting caught himself.

“Not so far this year,” Wilson said. “Too many bad penalties at critical times.”

The Stars scored three goals in the second period before the Ducks managed their second shot of the period.

“That [penalty] kind of took the wind out of our sails a little bit,” said Sacco, who was in the lineup for the first time in four games--and that was only because Valeri Karpov broke his right wrist on Monday, creating a hole--or better put, another hole in a team that has many right now.

Duck Notes

The Ducks got a scare when they saw rookie center Chad Kilger go down and lie crumpled against the boards for quite some time in the second period, but he suffered only a bruised left forearm. He did not return. . . . Paul Kariya scored his seventh goal of the season and defenseman Bobby Dollas scored his first. . . . Mikhail Shtalenkov started in goal, with Guy Hebert expected to start against St. Louis tonight. . . . Captain Randy Ladouceur was a healthy scratch for the second consecutive game, even though he has the best plus-minus on the team, at plus four. “It bothers anybody who sits out. All of us want to play,” Ladouceur said. Coach Ron Wilson explained it as a numbers game with eight defensemen.