Ducks Having Devilish Time on Their Trip

If it seemed the road was going to be easy just because the Mighty Ducks have Paul Kariya healthy, Teemu Selanne ever-steady and goalie Guy Hebert playing very near his best . . .

It isn’t.

The Ducks lost a third game in a row Saturday for the first time since their eight-game losing streak in October, and they again are in last place in the Western Conference.

This time, they let a two-goal lead get away against the low-scoring, defensive-minded New Jersey Devils, losing, 5-3, in front of 19,040 at Continental Airlines Arena.

Bill Guerin scored twice for the Devils, who have lost only once in their last nine games.

The Ducks’ Garry Valk cut the lead to one at 12:36 of the final period, but his teammates couldn’t get anything going on their fourth futile power play of the night, and defenseman Scott Stevens sealed the outcome with an empty-net goal with 17 seconds left.

“Our power play was just horrendous . . . brutal,” said Kariya, who was held without a shot although he averages nearly six a game. “I had my chances. It just didn’t get through.”

The Ducks have had their chances in each of the three defeats--a 2-1 loss to Phoenix on Monday, a 3-2 loss on a last-minute shot by the New York Rangers on Friday, and Saturday’s game.

Key statistic: They don’t have a power-play goal in the last three games, going 0 for 12.

“We get power plays, and we’re not getting it done there,” Coach Ron Wilson said. “We refuse to shoot the puck from the point on the power play. If I have to play the fourth line on the power play just to get that point across, that’s what I’ll do in Ottawa [on Monday]. . . . Special teams are killing us right now. You can’t go out and lollygag through a power play and think your skill is enough to put the puck in the net. If the other team works hard and you don’t, it negates all the skill in the world.”

Kariya hears what Wilson is saying.

“When we were having success, we were taking a lot of point shots,” he said. “One shot sets up other plays. We’re trying to make fancy plays, and it’s not working.”

Kariya and Selanne had some difficulty operating against the Devils’ line of Brian Rolston, Valeri Zelepukin and John MacLean and the defense pair of Stevens and Shawn Chambers, much as they were checked by Mark Messier’s line against the Rangers.

“I can’t say enough about the job done by Rolston, Zelepukin and MacLean. Great, just great,” New Jersey Coach Jacques Lemaire said.

The Devils started the game with goalie Martin Brodeur on the bench and backup Mike Dunham in net. A teammate of Kariya’s on Maine’s 1993 NCAA championship team, Dunham gave up two goals in the first, and New Jersey quickly turned to Brodeur to start the second.

The Ducks led, 2-0, midway through the first after Ted Drury scored his second goal in two games and J.F. Jomphe added another, but the Devils scored three times in the second to take a 4-2 lead.

A flurry of fluky goals put the Ducks on their heels.

“The first one went through Bobby Dollas’ legs, then Dmitri Mironov gave the puck away a couple of times,” Wilson said. “The puck was bouncing all over the place, and one went in off Kenny Baumgartner’s rear end. But we deserved to have the breaks go against us in the second period. We shut it down, got very tentative, didn’t skate. I don’t know if it’s because we were tired, or just lack of intensity.”

Said Selanne: “I think we didn’t play smart enough. They played smart.”