Baumgartner Gets Moved to Defense

The Ducks tried out a new defenseman Saturday who happened to be an old defenseman--Ken Baumgartner.

“It has been five years and 250 games since I played defense regularly,” said Baumgartner, normally a fourth-line winger. “But I played five years and 250 games in this league as a defenseman, and all my minor league hockey.”

Duck Coach Ron Wilson scratched rookies Nikolai Tsulygin and Ruslan Salei, leaving him with only five regular defensemen, and added forward Roman Oksiuta to the lineup after scratching him 15 consecutive games.

“I wanted to get Oksiuta in there. It had been a long time since he played,” Wilson said. “We tried Ken Baumgartner on defense. He’s practiced there four or five times. He made a couple of mistakes, but I thought he played pretty well.”

The move showed Wilson isn’t entirely comfortable with Tsulygin and Salei, who rotate in and out of the lineup and play sparingly. Hence the Baumgartner experiment.

“Any time you’re put in a new situation, you want to respond positively,” Baumgartner said. “There was a lot of adrenaline on my side.”

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Defenseman Bobby Dollas appeared in his 118th consecutive game, tying Paul Kariya’s club record. Kariya’s mark ended when he missed the beginning of the season because of a lingering abdominal injury.

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Winger Brian Bellows missed part of the first period after being cut in the face but returned at the start of the second period.