Scoring a Goal Helps to Ease Haller’s Pain

There was a trickle of blood on the face of Duck defenseman Kevin Haller late Saturday night, but there also was a grin stretching from ear to ear.

After all, what’s a couple of stitches when you’ve just scored your first goal in 74 games?

“I just saw a good opportunity,” Haller said of racing toward the net on left wing for his first goal since Feb. 7, 1998, when he played for the Carolina Hurricanes.

“Paul [Kariya] and I were joking about a [recent] two-on-one we had,” Haller said after the Ducks’ 4-1 victory over the San Jose Sharks. “I figured the play was over. I didn’t trust him. He made something from nothing. We’ve joked about that play for the last few weeks. I told him I was going to trust him from now on.”

So when Kariya and Teemu Selanne zoomed into the Sharks’ zone with the puck, Haller went with them.

“If I missed that one then that was it, I was going to be a decoy for the rest of the season,” Haller joked.

How he was bloodied was no laughing matter.

Haller was slammed face first into the glass by San Jose’s Shawn Burr, who received a boarding major and a game misconduct for the second-period hit. Haller needed several stitches to close a cut on his face.

“It was a dirty hit,” Haller said. “He hit me high, above my shoulders with his fists and stick aiming for my head.”

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Selanne on scoring his 300th NHL goal in his 464th game Saturday against the Sharks: “I’ve scored pretty ones and ugly ones, and I don’t care how they look. I’ve been lucky to play with some great players.”

Selanne has a 13-game point streak, the longest current streak in the NHL and the second-longest in the league this season behind an 18-game streak by Philadelphia’s Eric Lindros.

Selanne also has a six-game goal-scoring streak. Buffalo’s Miroslav Satan had an eight-game streak and Lindros a seven-game streak earlier this season.

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The Ducks have outscored the opposition, 14-4, during their four-game winning streak. But the Ducks haven’t won five in a row since a franchise-record six-game streak in March 1996.

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Casino night, the Ducks’ annual black-tie fund-raising event for the Disney Goals charity for disadvantaged children, will be held at 8 tonight at the Arrowhead Pond.