Ducks Keep Heat on Flames and Win, 3-2 : Hockey: After letting victory slip away in last game, they make effort for ninth victory in 12 games.

The Mighty Ducks are so scalding hot that they burned themselves Sunday against Florida.

But against the struggling Calgary Flames on Tuesday, they played more carefully and came away with a 3-2 victory in front of 17,584 at the Saddledome. It was their ninth victory in the last 12 games.

“When you lose a game, the guys all pay attention again,” Duck Coach Ron Wilson said. “You’ve been saying, ‘The stove’s hot, the stove’s hot.’ And they say, ‘What’s this guy know?’

“They see the first guy burn his hand, and they still put theirs out there. That’s what it was the other night, everybody putting theirs out there.”

Trailing by a goal after two periods against Calgary--a team that has won three games all season--the Ducks persisted and came away winners after center Mike Sillinger tied the score, 2-2, with a power-play goal at 12:05 and center Steve Rucchin scored the game-winner in a scramble in front of the net at 16:37. The goal was Rucchin’s ninth of the season. He also had an assist on Sillinger’s goal.

Duck goalie Guy Hebert had to fend off a six-on-four attack for the final 56 seconds when defenseman Jason York was sent off for cross-checking, with goalie Trevor Kidd already off for an extra attacker. But defenseman Robert Dirk made a big play by sweeping Zarley Zalapski’s dangerous centering pass out of the slot as the final seconds ticked down.

It was a far cry from the Ducks’ performance Sunday, when they took a two-goal lead into the third period against the even hotter Florida Panthers, then turned aloof and lost, 4-3.

“The key is to stick to the game plan and be patient,” said Sillinger, who scored his eighth goal of the season on a snap shot from the right circle. “We were all very confident after the first and after the second. We said, ‘Let’s stick with it and keep getting the puck toward the net.’ ”

As for the Florida game: “We got burned. We threw away two points,” Sillinger said.

This time, they took a 1-0 lead at 14:42 of the first on defenseman Oleg Tverdovsky’s fourth goal of the season, another power-play slap shot from the point. But Calgary’s Steve Chiasson tied the score in the final minute of the period, and the Flames took a 2-1 lead when Cory Stillman scored on a power play at 18:33 of the second.

The Ducks have cooled a bit lately, and face a challenge because of a spate of injuries. The latest and perhaps most costly is to center Shaun Van Allen, who was expected to be out about a week because of a dislocated right thumb.

Instead, the team has lost him for a month after he underwent surgery Tuesday morning at the Kerlan-Jobe Clinic at Centinela Hospital in Inglewood, where hand specialist Norman Zemel inserted pins to stabilize the thumb.

Van Allen, 27, is a gritty two-way player who had been centering Paul Kariya and Patrik Carnback on the first line, and Wilson said the team missed him almost from its first game without him, calling him “a guy who above all goes out and shuts down the other team.” Van Allen had four goals and 14 points in 19 games.

The team also is without enforcer Todd Ewen for a month because of hand surgery, and doesn’t expect right wing Valeri Karpov to return until after New Year’s because of a broken wrist.

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Duck Notes

A drive to register potential bone marrow donors for defenseman Milos Holan and other patients in need of marrow transplants will be held Dec. 9 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the National Sports Grill at 450 N. State College Blvd. in Orange. . . . Center Viacheslav Butsayev, called up from minor league affiliate Baltimore on Monday, used to share a practice rink with Russian figure skater Sergei Grinkov and his wife and partner, Ekaterina Gordeeva, when Butsayev played for the Central Red Army hockey team in Moscow. Grinkov died of a heart attack Monday at 28. “It’s very sad. He was a friend,” said Butsayev, 25. “I can’t believe it. He was a great athlete, a really good person. Everybody in my country loved him. For Russian people, he was like an idol of the last few years.”