Cincinnati Kids Pick Up Ducks

It can be tough to gain attention when recent NHL player-of-the-week winners such as Brett Hull and Teemu Selanne are on the ice.

As it turned out Saturday night, a couple of guys who haven’t even spent a week in the league this season stole the show.

Jeremy Stevenson and Jeff Nielsen, who were called up from the Mighty Ducks’ farm team in Cincinnati on Thursday, scored in a 2-0 victory over the St. Louis Blues at the Kiel Center. The Ducks snapped a six-game winless streak (0-5-1) by beating the top team in the Western Conference.

“The kids from Cincinnati did the job for us,” Duck defenseman J.J. Daigneault said.

The defense and goaltender Guy Hebert did the rest, holding the Blues scoreless on 23 shots for Hebert’s second shutout of the season. It was the first victory for the Ducks (9-10-5) since they beat Vancouver on Nov. 8. The Blues fell to 15-7-2.

Stevenson provided everything from scoring punch to punching power. He even made plays when he was on the ground; the puck hit him and ricocheted out of the Duck zone to end a harrowing sequence of shots fired at Hebert in the final minute of the second period.

He picked up the Ducks’ first penalties of the night, for slashing and then fighting with Rudy Poeschek at the 7:23 mark. That didn’t come as much of a surprise, since he said after he arrived in Anaheim that he wanted to punish people if they messed with Selanne.

What was unexpected was his goal with 5:29 remaining in the second period. On a night when Selanne looked sluggish, Stevenson did a pretty good imitation of the team’s scoring leader when he took the puck just outside his own blue line, skated untouched to the top of the left circle and fired a shot past St. Louis goaltender Grant Fuhr.

“It shocked me as well as everyone else, I guess,” Stevenson said. “I don’t know where [the defenders] all went. I’m happy that they weren’t there.”

It was the first career goal for Stevenson, who has played in nine games with the Ducks over the past two seasons. He hopes the points won’t be too rare.

“I want to be an all-around player, not just step on the ice, fight and get off,” Stevenson said. “I want to become a player that’s respected in the league.”

He did exercise some good judgment, declining to fight when St. Louis tough guy Tony Twist wanted some action.

“He wanted to stir things up and we were on a good roll and I didn’t want to give them a lift,” Stevenson said.

Stevenson’s goal ended a scoreless string of 74 minutes 40 seconds for the Ducks, who were shut out by the Chicago Blackhawks on Wednesday night.

St. Louis has its own scoring problems; the Blues haven’t scored since Al MacInnis took a game-winning slap shot from the blue line with 1.8 seconds left against Toronto two games ago.

Neither team converted a power-play opportunity. Few have against the Blues, who are second in the league in penalty killing and have killed 60 of their last 64 short-handed situations after stopping four Duck power plays Saturday night.

The Blues went 0 for 5 on the power play against the Ducks, including a hooking penalty on Warren Rychel that gave them an advantage with 6 1/2 minutes remaining and the Ducks clinging to a 1-0 lead.

Nielsen spent time on the second shift of the penalty-killing unit. He padded the lead when Joe Sacco flipped the puck high in the air, he caught up to it and shot between Fuhr’s pads for his first career goal and a 2-0 lead with 3:16 left, sending the 20,184 fans to the exits.

“It wasn’t even that good of a shot,” Fuhr said.