Winning Solution for Ducks

The season gets shorter, and the picture gets clearer.

If the Mighty Ducks win their last four games, they will be in the Stanley Cup playoffs for the first time.

That much is assured, and plenty of other permutations are possible. But after beating San Jose, 5-3, Sunday to pull to three points behind Winnipeg and Calgary for the final Western Conference playoff spots, the Ducks have reduced the season to manageable form.

“We’re not looking at something impossible,” Duck Coach Ron Wilson said. “We knew if we went 5-0, we’re in. Now it’s 4-0. If we win tomorrow, it’s 3-0. We can win three games in a row.”

Lose even one, though, and the Ducks will need one of the five teams scrambling for position above them to falter, perhaps considerably.

“We’re going to get some help from somebody,” Wilson said.

The team the Ducks can mow down simply by winning the rest of their games is sixth-place Vancouver, their opponent tonight at the Pond in a game that is the most important in team history--at least until the next one Wednesday at Colorado.

Vancouver leads the Ducks by five points but has only two games left. If the Ducks beat the Canucks tonight, they can pass them by winning their final three--no matter what Vancouver does in its final game.

The star’s billing in Sunday’s game again went to Paul Kariya after he scored his 46th goal of the season and set up three others--all in a second-period blitz that gave the Ducks a commanding lead and put Kariya over the 100-point mark for the season with 101. He is the 11th player to reach 100 points this season--and at 21, the youngest, just ahead of Colorado’s Peter Forsberg, who is 22.

“It’s nice, but the important thing is to get us into the Stanley Cup playoffs, not my stats,” said Kariya, who set a Duck record for points in a period Sunday, as well as in a game.

The Ducks have long thought Kariya would be a 100-point scorer. They didn’t think it would be this soon, in his second NHL season.

“To be honest, I was thinking maybe a point a game this year, 80 points, with the people we began the season with,” Wilson said. “He started getting going all by himself before we made the trade, and when Teemu [Selanne] came in, I knew it was automatic.”

The game Sunday in front of the usual sellout crowd of 17,190 at San Jose Arena was one that made Wilson nervous, partly because he remembers a devastating 6-0 late-season loss in the building two years ago, and partly because he was worried about the effect of seeing three teams move two more points ahead of the Ducks Saturday night.

“I was proud of the way we came up with a win,” he said. “Today was a real psychological hump because we’d played great but slipped through no fault of our own.”

San Jose put up some spirited opposition, especially early, but the Ducks jumped ahead 4-1 in the second and led, 5-1, before allowing two third-period goals.

“We relaxed too much,” said Wilson, who wanted to play everyone and conserve the energy of some of his key players in the third in preparation for tonight’s game against the Canucks--a game in which the assignment is clear.

“When you have 15 games left, your mind’s not always 100% there,” Selanne said. “You can’t win them all. But after you get down to four, you can do your best every night. It’s easier to keep your concentration and keep focused on what the team has to do.”

Exactly what the Ducks have to do won’t be clear for a few days.

“But if we win all your games, we don’t have to worry about it,” Selanne said.

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Duck Notes

Paul Kariya is the first player from any of the five recent expansion teams to reach 100 points while playing the whole season with the expansion team. (The Ducks’ Teemu Selanne has 103 points, but got 72 with Winnipeg before being traded.) “That’s absolutely amazing, when you consider really what we are is an expansion team,” Duck Coach Ron Wilson said. “We’ve got a bunch of grinders. As we get better, you hate to say it, but Paul might get 200 points some day. I mean, he’s 21 and he does this in his second year in the league?”. . . Defenseman Darren Van Impe scored his first NHL goal. . . Enforcer Todd Ewen is eligible to return to the lineup tonight after serving a three-game suspension for accumulating his fifth game-misconduct penalty, but Wilson hadn’t decided Sunday whether he’d put him back in the lineup tonight.