Ducks Seize the Moment, Beat Canucks, 5-2

Mighty Duck Coach Ron Wilson asked his players to sense the moment. Then, one after another, they seized it.

With three minutes to go against Vancouver Sunday at the Pond in a game heavy with playoff-race drama, the score was tied.

When the horn sounded, the Ducks had won, 5-2, sweeping two crucial weekend games and winning two in a row for the first time in a month and a half. It was also their eighth win in the last nine games at home.

The Ducks played floor-burn hockey when it mattered most, diving and scrapping to win. The victory tied them with Vancouver for ninth place, one point behind Calgary for the final Western Conference playoff spot.

Teemu Selanne, so routinely extraordinary, scored a spectacular sprawling goal with his skates knocked out from under him after Steve Rucchin’s faceoff win with 2:41 left. That broke a 2-2 tie that had threatened to devolve into a battle of special teams, a scary prospect for the Ducks.

Less than a minute later, Kevin Todd broke the tension that remained by scoring off a pass from Jari Kurri. It was Todd’s first goal since Dec. 1, a span of 27 games. His breakthrough came the day after he had an apparent goal disallowed for being in the crease for the second time in a week.

“It was a big relief,” said Todd, who had a dollar bill taped into the handle of his stick, a bit of encouragement from his wife, Dana. “She told me to wrap it up and put it in my hand, kind of to take my mind off it, maybe you can buy one,” he said.

“You go 27 games without a goal, and you read about it every day in the papers.”

After a week of wretched luck, his turned good. “But I ended up looking down to see if I was in the crease as soon as I scored,” he said.

The Ducks got another goal with 55 seconds left, when Paul Kariya scored into an empty net--his second goal of the game and his 30th in 48 games this season.

“Every game is so important now,” Kariya said. “You can’t go after one team. You never know which team you’re going to need to catch. Look at us last year, we were one point out of the playoffs and two points out of home ice.”

Center Steve Rucchin played a huge supporting role, assisting on Kariya’s second-period goal and on Selanne’s game-winner.

Vancouver defenseman Bret Hedican gave the Canucks a 1-0 lead before Kurri tied the score in the second. Then Kariya sprinted in alone and rifled a shot past goalie Kirk McLean for a 2-1 lead after combining on an extrasensory perception play with Rucchin and Selanne.

Rucchin won the puck in a battle along the left-wing boards, pushing it up to Selanne, who touch-passed it to Kariya, already dashing for the net.

Still, despite Guy Hebert’s work--he finished with 37 saves--the Canucks tied the score, 2-2, late in the second when Mike Ridley beat him on the short side.

But Rucchin’s persistence payed off again on the winning goal, when he muscled toward the goal to control the puck after taking a draw, just barely pushing it over to Selanne. One of Hedican’s skates tripped up Selanne, who nevertheless stretched out his stick to knock the puck into the net.

“It was a great play by him,” Selanne said.

The goal was Selanne’s 37th this season, and it came only a minute or so after the scoreboard video showed his son, Eemil, who turned 1 on Sunday.

For Eemil’s first birthday, Selanne had a game-winning goal and two assists.

“It’s not good enough, because when he was born I had a hat trick,” Selanne said. “This wasn’t as good as that.”