Talent Can’t Replay Games for the Ducks

The Mighty Ducks’ morning skate Monday was optional. Soon, the rest of their season might be too.

Their 3-1 victory over Nashville at the Arrowhead Pond on Monday kept them three points from the final Western Conference playoff spot, the ultimate good news-bad news scenario. They didn’t lose ground to San Jose, which defeated Edmonton, 1-0, but they didn’t gain any. And they lost some precious time.

In reality, they shouldn’t be fighting for a playoff spot after 79 games. They shouldn’t be anxiously tracking out-of-town results and facing each shift as if it were the most important of the season--which it is.

In a conference top-heavy with St. Louis, Detroit, Dallas and Colorado but weak at the bottom, the Ducks shouldn’t be on a bubble that’s in danger of bursting. They have too much talent to be jousting with the Vancouver Canucks, Calgary Flames and Sharks.

On some level, Coach Craig Hartsburg knows that. But he can’t stop to think of what should have been. He knows only that his team is not in the top eight in the conference. How that happened is irrelevant now.

“At the end of the season, you look at things that didn’t go well, an area of the season that hurt you or things you can fix,” he said. “But we’re not thinking about it now. We’re thinking about where we are and what we can do about it. . . .

“We’ve been trying to do that for the last month or six weeks. We talked. ‘Just keep moving ahead, keep moving ahead to the next game.’ ”

Or, as baseball hall of famer Satchel Paige said, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”

If the Ducks looked back, they’d grind their remaining teeth. There was Saturday, when they held the Kings without a shot in the first period but lost, 2-1. There were losses to Tampa Bay in December and the Islanders in January. Two losses to Montreal. The game in which they led Carolina, 4-0, in the third period and barely escaped with a 4-4 tie. A point or two from each of those games, and they would be jockeying for fifth or sixth.

Until next Monday, however, they can’t afford to peek in their rearview mirror.

“You can’t change things that are in the past, but you can change the future,” defenseman Oleg Tverdovsky said. “That’s all we can think about. We’re focused on the games we have left. There’s no sense in thinking back. There will be plenty of time this summer to think about it.”

More time, maybe, than they would like.

“Of course it would be a disappointment if we don’t make it, but every guy in this dressing room believes we will make it,” Tverdovsky said. “Nobody is thinking what would happen if we don’t.”

A week from now, though, they might be.

HE BROOKS NO NONSENSE

Herb Brooks was proclaimed a miracle worker for coaching the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team to a gold medal at Lake Placid. If he gets the Pittsburgh Penguins into the playoffs, he may have accomplished an equally remarkable feat.

Injuries have kept NHL co-scoring leader Jaromir Jagr out of 29 games, the Penguins have won only 12 games on the road, and their team goals-against average of 2.87 is the highest among teams in playoff spots. Their defense is held together by hope, and they put their goaltending in the untested hands of rookie Jean-Sebastien Aubin and the undistinguished hands of Ron Tugnutt when they traded Tom Barrasso to Ottawa.

That was after General Manager Craig Patrick had fired Coach Kevin Constantine on Dec. 9, with the Penguins 8-14-3-4 and fans skeptical about the future of a team Mario Lemieux barely rescued from bankruptcy last summer.

Patrick gave the coaching job to Brooks, his boss on that gold-medal journey 20 years ago, even though Brooks is 62 and had not coached in the NHL since 1993.

Despite constant adversity, the Penguins are seventh in the East. Their financial future is still far from solid, but they have learned to live for the moment.

Said Brooks: “I told Craig when he asked me to do this, ‘I figured I always owed you something, but after this year, we’re even. In fact, you may owe me.’

“This team is so offensively dependent on Jagr, it really stymies us when he doesn’t play. It kills you because he’s 45%-50% of our offense. A lot of how we do depends on Jags’ availability. Of the teams on the bubble, we’ve had the toughest schedule.”

Brooks’ term will be short. The Penguins hired former Czech Olympic coach Ivan Hlinka to coach them next season, and he and Brooks often work together behind the bench.

“I thought I’d be gone by now, but they said they wanted me to stay on and help them through the transition,” Brooks said. “That was fine with me. [Hlinka is] an interesting guy, and I think he’ll do well.”

Brooks is enjoying his return to coaching, but he won’t mind when it ends and he can work again as the Penguins’ western Canadian scout.

“We’ll compete and hope we have enough,” he said. “And I’ll just go back to Moose Jaw.”

MVP MATERIAL?

No defenseman has been voted the most valuable player since Boston’s Bobby Orr in 1972, but St. Louis’ Chris Pronger may change that.

Pronger, 25, leads the NHL in minutes per game with an average of 30:13, is the plus-minus leader at plus-49, and ranks second in scoring among defensemen with 13 goals and 58 points. All this for the team with the NHL’s best defense and best record.

“He has factored in the outcome of a great majority of our games,” Coach Joel Quenneville said. “His stats are good, but I measure performance by consistency. And game in and game out, he’s been great.”

Teammate Al MacInnis, voted the NHL’s top defenseman last season, has seen Pronger raise his already high performance level.

“The way I like to judge something like that is to take all the top players in the league and think, ‘One for one, who would you trade him for?’ ” MacInnis said. “It’s a pretty short list in his case. The guy plays half the game, and chances are [opponents] aren’t going to get a good scoring chance when he’s out there. Offensively, he’s contributing a lot and he controls the game when he’s out there.”

If Pronger had a vote, he would cast it for Jagr as MVP.

“He makes [the Penguins] a different team,” Pronger said. “Otherwise, it’s a crapshoot. There’s three, four guys who could win it.”

ON THE FIRING LINE

Surprise! Mike Keenan wants to become coach or general manager of the New York Rangers, jobs that opened last week when John Muckler and Neil Smith were fired. But having seen his devious, backbiting ways up close in 1994, Madison Square Garden executives won’t want to go through that again.

Initial rumors had Edmonton General Manager Glen Sather becoming the Rangers’ general manager, but that’s a stretch. Although Sather has been frustrated dealing with the large group that owns the Oilers, he’s not eager to live under the microscope in New York. Sather, who spends part of the year in Palm Springs, has made enough money in real estate to take it easy, not take on the headaches of a $61-million mess.

The best choice might be General Manager Lou Lamoriello of the New Jersey Devils, whose contract will expire when the club’s sale to YankeeNets is completed. He’s smart, a tough negotiator and good at finding and developing talent. But he shuns media attention, both on himself and his team, and the Rangers are a high-profile franchise in need of major image-rebuilding.

With that in mind, the Rangers may turn to goalie-turned-TV analyst John Davidson, who is enormously popular in New York and has been an unofficial personnel consultant. He has a great situation, working on ABC and Ranger telecasts, but the prospect of running a team intrigues him. And the Rangers could do worse.

SLAP SHOTS

Stephane Quintal’s whining to the newspaper La Presse that playing for Muckler “was hell” and his wanting to be traded back to Montreal are revolting. No one forced him to sign a four-year, $11.4-million deal with the Rangers as a free agent last summer, and he liked their money enough to cash $3.95 million of their paychecks.

Dave Checketts, president and chief executive of Madison Square Garden, was right to suspend Quintal and send him home, although the way the Rangers are playing, that’s almost a reward. Theo Fleury, however, wants to come back. Not that he has much trade value after an awful season and two years left on a three-year, $21-million contract.

Toronto defenseman Bryan Berard was able to perceive more light during a test on his injured right eye last Friday, but his recovery is still projected as a six-month process. . . . Sergei Zubov’s knee injury will have a ripple effect on the Dallas Stars. Without him, Darryl Sydor will add power-play time to his already high total, and Sylvain Cote and Dave Manson will take on additional duty. That may be asking too much.

Barrasso is 3-4 with a 3.16 goals-against average and .879 save percentage since he was traded from Pittsburgh to Ottawa, numbers that don’t inspire confidence going into the playoffs.