It’s Time for Real Ducks to Please Stand Up

Boy, do the Mighty Ducks need to win Friday night at the Pond.

The Ducks need to score, oh, about four goals in the first period against San Jose. The Ducks need to pound some Sharks, need to spin around a goalie, need to be the first to reach a puck, throw a check. The Ducks need to put the Might back into Mighty. And do it Mighty quick.

If the Ducks had planned to prove their playoff potential Wednesday night against the Dallas Stars at Reunion Arena, if the Ducks had planned to stay ahead of St. Louis, keep on track to play Phoenix and not Detroit in the first round of the NHL playoffs, if the Ducks wanted to have people believe in them as something dangerous and worth watching in the weeks and maybe even months to come, then what happened?

The Ducks couldn’t hold onto their sticks or their starting goalie or their pride in a 5-1 loss to the Stars, a loss that ended a five-game road trip in the same way it began--with a listless, lifeless loss to a team that is expected to advance smartly and deeply into the playoffs.

Qualified observers say that the 7-1 loss to New Jersey last week was a more embarrassing effort than Wednesday night’s bomb against Dallas. Which is kind of like saying that losing Mo Vaughn to an injury incurred while falling into a dugout while chasing a fly ball is worse than losing Gary DiSarcina to a broken wrist incurred while walking away from the batting cage and having said wrist smashed by the swinging bat of a first base coach.

But, OK, never mind that.

Team president and general manager Pierre Gauthier stood outside the Duck locker room, his mouth set tightly in a straight line, his eyes looking straight ahead at a wall. This was a man who didn’t want to be spoken to. When he was, Gauthier would answer questions about the Ducks with only the statement, “Ask the coach about that.”

Which turned out to be impossible because the coach, Craig Hartsburg, um, declined comment, was the way a public relations spokesman put it. In other words, Hartsburg was going be able to put that Mighty Duck charter flight back to Anaheim into the sky without an engine being turned on.

It was becoming slightly fashionable for national commentators to start saying that the Ducks, with Paul Kariya and Teemu Selanne as a dangerous scoring tandem and with Guy Hebert as capable of stopping teams by himself, to be a dark-horse candidate for playoff stardom.

Or maybe not.

There is some redeeming to be done by the Ducks after this 1-3-1 trip. It needs to be done immediately and against some good teams.

San Jose would qualify.

The Sharks started this season 0-6-2. They’ve reached .500 (30-30-17) and they’re playing with a sense of purpose and of confidence. Both things the Ducks seemed to have before this road trip.

During Wednesday’s loss, though, goalie Dominic Roussel collapsed in a heap after making a save on a slap shot taken while his teammates had a man advantage. Roussel needed assistants under each arm to help him off the ice. Back spasms was the diagnosis. Which meant that poor Hebert, who had been kicking back and smiling on the bench, was suddenly grabbing for big gloves and a mask and then waving helplessly as shots kept flying by.

At least Hebert had been scheduled as off. The rest of the Ducks weren’t. Yet there were back-to-back plays where a Duck dropped his stick in front of Hebert. Playing defense with a stick is hard enough for the Ducks these days. Without one, there was just a lot of arm flailing going on.

Roussel said afterward that this road trip wasn’t so bad, that it was “good for the guys to spend a lot of time together.”

This must have been the painkillers talking for it seemed unlikely, when guys like Kariya and Selanne spoke later about lack of effort and fight and desire, that there was going to be much male bonding taking place on the overnight trip home.

Kariya said he had the feeling some Ducks “didn’t want this game enough,” and that “the effort just wasn’t there.”

Selanne said the way the Ducks had played over the last week wouldn’t be “good enough to even make the playoffs.”

It might be time to point out that this loss makes Anaheim’s record at Dallas 1-11-1 and so Wednesday’s loss was hardly unexpected.

But that’s the thing. Kariya would like to think that expectations are rising and all the Ducks might like to think about big road wins against very good teams because that’s what must be done during the playoffs.

Instead the Mighty Ducks must come home, tail feathers dragging between their webbed feet and try to recover. Quickly.

Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com