Cold Ducks Are Already in Hot Water

The Mighty Ducks didn’t play badly.

Except for when Patrick Traverse scored a goal for Detroit. And when Steve Rucchin got his stick broken and, left defenseless, watched while the Red Wings scored another goal.

And so the Ducks still have a winless streak going, seven games and counting, as the Red Wings came to the Arrowhead Pond and won, 3-2.

It is only November and the Ducks don’t have a terrible record, but there is the scent of despair around this team, a sense that whatever is wrong can’t be fixed.

If you believe in omens, there are no good ones for the Ducks right now. Their charter out of Denver Saturday night, out of the freezing cold and away from the disappointing 3-1 loss to the best team in hockey, the Colorado Avalanche, broke.

From the airport the tired Ducks slogged back to the hotel. There was little sleep and an early morning plane back to Southern California. There wasn’t time to go home but only to another hotel for a bit of rest and probably some nightmares.

And after Sunday’s loss, the Mighty Unlucky Ducks had to take cold showers. A pipe broke. Those shouts you heard about 8 p.m. were Ducks who turned on the hot water. Oops.

The excuses for the 2000-2001 season sound so much like the excuses for the 1999-2000 season.

Not enough hard work. Not enough smart play. Not enough luck. Or no luck. Or too much bad luck. Lack of desire. Lack of power play. Missing-in-action heart.

We heard them all last year, we are already hearing them this year.

If those are all truths and not the desperate hopes of the deluded who want to believe this team has the right general manager, the right coach and the right players, then it means nothing much was done between last year’s no-playoffs season and this new one to get rid of the excuses.

When the Red Wings come to the Pond, it means at least that there is noise and enthusiasm and lots of people wearing Gordie Howe shirts and Brendan Shanahan shirts and Steve Yzerman shirts and Sergei Fedorov shirts. There were periodic chants of “Let’s go Red Wings,” and the slightly quieter and infinitely less clever retort of Duck fans--”Boo.”

Better than booing would have been winning by the home team.

But in the first 20 seconds Paul Kariya shot a puck that was nine-tenths across the line and into the Detroit goal. But one-tenth of the puck stayed on the line and there was no score.

Nope, the first score went to the Red Wings, courtesy of Traverse, off whose skate the puck caromed past Anaheim goalie Guy Hebert. Is that just bad luck or making your own bad luck? As Duck Coach Craig Hartsburg said, “The saying in this league is that if you don’t have a play, put it on the net.” That’s what the Red Wings did.

At the end of the first period the Ducks were losing, 2-0. After 3 minutes 43 seconds of the second period, the Ducks were tied with Detroit, 2-2.

It was, Hartsburg said, the best period of hockey the Ducks have played this season. And even then, at the end of their best period, Shanahan scored his second goal of the game, a power-play goal, with 1:37 left in the second. It was the game-winner.

Hartsburg had a tinge of green in his cheeks, to match his shirt afterward. But he insists the Ducks have played better in the losses to Colorado and Detroit than in many of their early season wins. The Ducks might not have worked continuously hard enough or smart enough in those early wins. Maybe they were rewarded for bad habits and now they are being punished.

As in the NBA, the NHL’s Western Conference is much the better of the two halves. The best team in the West, Colorado, has 27 points. The best team in the East, Ottawa, has 22. The Ducks and their 17 points would be sixth in the East. In the West they are 11th.

And maybe Hartsburg is right. Maybe the Ducks did play pretty well against Colorado and even better against Detroit. “To me,” Hartsburg said bravely, “it’s coming. But maybe we lack confidence. We’re still trying to find that. I see some good signs. The team is starting to come out of (its slump).”

With 44 seconds left in Sunday’s game, Detroit’s Kirk Maltby took a silly holding penalty. There was a face off in front of Hebert. If the Ducks won it, Hebert would be quickly off the ice and Anaheim would have a two-man advantage and maybe 40 seconds to swarm Detroit goalie Manny Legace and tie the game. But the Ducks didn’t win it. Hebert didn’t get off the ice for another 15 seconds or so and the disorganized Ducks never got off one shot in those final 44 seconds.

“We’ve got to have that puck,” Hartsburg said. “We didn’t get it. We’ve got our best players out there, they have their best players. One side is going to win (the draw), one side is going to lose it. We lost it.”

Lately the Ducks always do. And by the time they figure out how to win, in the Best West, it may be too late. Even in November.

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