Canucks Wake in Time to Put Ducks to Sleep

The home team had been in such in a low-spirited spiral that a Vancouver newspaper last week urged the Canucks to lose some teeth and win some games.

Mighty Duck fans probably don’t care if the Ducks keep their teeth, but they’d like them to win some games--and trade for a defenseman, most likely.

An invigorated Vancouver team beat the Ducks, 4-2, Saturday night at GM Place after losing five of its last six games.

The Ducks lost for the fifth time in seven games, and two more weeks with this lineup might be disastrous. They fell to four points out of a playoff spot Saturday, a night when three of their rivals won, including the Canucks.

Can the Ducks really afford to make do with rookies while they wait on their crew of injured players to return?

There were six rookies in the lineup Saturday, including defensemen Dan Trebil and Ruslan Salei, who had only 26 games of NHL experience between them. It might have been seven if defenseman Jason Marshall hadn’t been able to play despite a sore thumb.

But it wasn’t only the defensemen--and not only the rookies--who faltered.

“I didn’t like the commitment on the part of our forwards at all,” Duck Coach Ron Wilson said. “We didn’t do a good job of backchecking. We’ve got a young, inexperienced defense right now because of injuries, and we didn’t help matters by not coming back.

“Being near a guy, 20 feet away, is not backchecking.”

That the score was only 2-0 after 20 minutes--and not something like 5-0--was a high compliment to goalie Guy Hebert, who robbed Pavel Bure, Mike Sillinger and Alexander Mogilny in the first period and stopped a four-on-two as well.

By the time the score was 4-1 less than halfway through the second, Wilson presented Hebert with what can best be described as a mercy pull. Hebert had faced 27 shots in 29 minutes 29 seconds, and Wilson sent Mikhail Shtalenkov in, giving Hebert some rest and Shtalenkov some work.

The Canucks apparently took all the criticism from Coach Tom Renney and the local papers to heart, coming out with some purposeful hits early in the game.

Russ Courtnall, who had only six goals this season after scoring 26 last season, got the first goal, scoring from the right wing with the Canucks on a counterattack.

“Paul [Kariya] had a great scoring opportunity but Kirk McLean denied him, and we were a little lazy coming back,” Wilson said. “If we’d gotten off to a good start we could have used the pressure that’s been building here [against the Canucks], but it blew up in our faces.”

Martin Gelinas scored short-handed for the Canucks’ second goal, dashing in behind all five Ducks to take a pass from Courtnall that was tipped by the Ducks’ Brian Bellows. It was the 10th time this season a team has scored against the Ducks’ power play. Only Calgary has given up more short-handed goals, at 14.

“There should not be any chance they should score short-handed,” right wing Teemu Selanne said. “In the first and second period, we made a couple of mistakes. Half the game we played well, but we woke up too late.”

The Ducks’ only goals were scored by Selanne, his 33rd, and Kariya, his 26th--but their line was on the ice for some goals against as well.

The game marked only the second time this season the Ducks have lost when Kariya and Selanne both scored a goal. The other was only last week, in a 4-2 loss in Toronto.

Selanne’s goal 3:59 into the second made the score 2-1, but it got no closer. Mike Ridley made it 3-1 when he deftly backhanded a rebound behind his back and into the net as he skated past a tangle in front of the Duck net at 6:42 of the second. Jyrki Lumme made it 4-1 less than three minutes later after he skated in on Hebert around Dmitri Mironov on a power play while Mironov made a futile attempt to hook him. Kariya’s goal with 15 seconds left in the second only made the game seem close--it really wasn’t.

The victory was Vancouver’s third against the Ducks in four games this season--hardly the record the Ducks want against rivals in the standings.

“It’s disappointing,” Duck winger Joe Sacco said. “We could have caught them tonight.”