Olausson Making His Point for Ducks

It isn’t often that Gustav Olausson gets to see his son, Fredrik, play hockey on live TV in Sweden. But on New Year’s Day it so happened that the one NHL game of the week that is broadcast live in Europe was the Mighty Ducks against Buffalo.

The Ducks won, 7-2, and Olausson collected four assists, and Gustav said he whooped and hollered loud enough to knock some ice off the roof.

And the thing is, the way he’s been playing, that four-point performance isn’t really that unexpected. For as the Mighty Ducks begin the second half of the season tonight by hosting Colorado, as the Ducks edge toward what would be an surprising spot in the playoffs, Freddie Olausson, who was acquired as a free-agent defenseman in August, is just as responsible as superstars Paul Kariya and Teemu Selanne for the rejuvenation of a team that was totally out of playoff contention well before the All-Star game a year ago.

Olausson, 32, has scored 21 points in the Ducks’ last 18 games. “He’s a pretty offensive defenseman,” says Selanne, who uses a giggle to punctuate his little joke. “But, really, I think Freddie is playing as well as any defenseman in the league right now. I really do.”

Three more points and Olausson will become only the second non-North-American-born defenseman to have scored 500 points in the NHL. The first was another Swede, Borje Salming, who played in the NHL from 1973 to 1989 and who just happened to be Olausson’s hockey hero when Olausson would play with a sawed-off stick on a little pond outside his home in Dadesjo. “I saw a headline once, ‘Salming 2, United States 1’ during a Canada Cup series, in 1976 I think,” Olausson said. “That caught my eye.”

You will not easily get Olausson to give himself any praise or much credit. He says, “I am not the best defenseman and I am not the best shooter so I just try and be OK at both.” He says he is not the reason the Ducks’ power play has improved so much this season, even though Selanne will offer that “Freddie is so smart on the power play,” and Duck Coach Craig Hartsburg will explain that “Freddie can create a lot of offense with a simple outlet pass because he can put the puck right on the tape of the stick of our scorers.”

It was a tough start to this season, though, for Olausson. He was the only free agent the Ducks had signed, which caused some discontent among fans who expected more from the ownership of a team that had finished 12th in the Western Conference a year ago.

And then Olausson, who had been discovered to have an enlarged spleen, became sick and sluggish during the preseason. He was even scratched from six early games including a stretch of three in a row in November.

“When he missed so much camp, he wasn’t in shape,” Hartsburg says.

“That was not a good time for me,” Olausson says, “because I was coming into a new situation with a lot of new players.”

This is Olausson’s second tour with the Ducks. He spent parts of the 1995-96 and 1996-97 seasons here, then went to Pittsburgh, where he played on a power play unit with Mario Lemieux, Jaromir Jagr, Ron Francis and Kevin Hatcher. Despite the Ducks’ pathetic 1997-98 season, Olausson said he had no qualms about signing with Anaheim.

Now he is skating on power play lines with Kariya, Selanne, Steve Rucchin and Marty McInnis. Olausson will diplomatically not say which power-play unit is better. Only that it has been two different experiences. “The line here is much faster,” he says. “If you’re not paying attention, pow, they are gone.

“When I looked at that roster here and saw names like Kariya and Selanne and a lot of other ones too, that is a lot of talent,” Olausson said. “Too much talent to not be a good team.”

Olausson came to North America and the NHL as a 19-year-old fourth-round draft pick of the Winnipeg Jets. If this seems a big adventure, a teenager on his own in a foreign country, well, not in the Olausson family.

“My dad left home as a 14-year-old to be a merchant seaman,” Olausson says.

“Yes, I did,” Gustav says by telephone from Sweden. “I saw Newport News [Virginia] and Halifax [Nova Scotia] before my son was ever a thought in my mind.”

And Gustav was a pretty fair hockey player himself. Freddie says his father brags about scoring on a slap shot from the blue line, “though I have never seen that.”

“He can ask many of my friends, it is true,” Gustav says. “They have seen it.”

It was Gustav who put Freddie in skates and on the ice as a 2-year-old and Gustav who enrolled Freddie in a junior league as a 6-year-old and Gustav who encouraged Freddie to play soccer as well as hockey and Gustav who was not happy when Freddie chose to drop soccer when he turned 13. “You see, Freddie could dribble the ball with both feet,” Gustav says. “I was a little angry when he quit soccer. But it worked OK, you know?”

Indeed. Olausson seemed to have a plan. By the time he was 15, Gustav said, Freddie was playing in three leagues at the same time--senior, junior and boys. “Sometimes he played two games in the same day and practiced, too.”

Olausson says there is no magical reason why he can’t seem to help himself from some sort of score in every game lately. “You know, sometimes things just happen. It is a natural progression,” he says.

Olausson, who has 29 points this season, has been the top-scoring defenseman in the NHL since Dec. 13. Perhaps more impressive, he is the league’s fourth-leading scorer since then. Kariya and Selanne are first and second. This leads Olausson to a conclusion.

“We should only keep getting better this season,” Olausson says. “We are still finding our way together. Why should we stop now?”

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com