Ducks Can’t Find Neutral Ground

The Mighty Ducks keep making mistakes trying to make up for their inability to score and it cost them again Thursday night at Vancouver.

Two times Anaheim’s defense was caught out of position trying to make plays in the neutral zone and the Canucks scored breakaway goals each time in a 3-2 victory over the Ducks in front of 15,972 at General Motors Place.

“When you want to [score] too much, you don’t,” defenseman Oleg Tverdovsky said. “It’s better to relax and take what they give you. It’s not good to force it.... But when you can’t put the puck in the net, you have [to take chances].”

And gambling is not something the Ducks did well against the Canucks, who used two goals from Todd Bertuzzi and one from Markus Naslund to end a two-game losing streak.

Duck goaltender Jean-Sebastien Giguere made 25 saves but lost his sixth consecutive start. His play wasn’t good enough to overcome the numerous missed opportunities the Ducks had against Vancouver goaltender Dan Cloutier.

“We do things that we shouldn’t have to do,” Duck Coach Bryan Murray said. “The mistakes that we make are so magnified because we don’t score goals. It’s so hard for us to score, we make one mistake and that decides the game almost every night.”

Vancouver didn’t take long to jump on top of the Ducks. In fact, the Canucks needed only 58 seconds before Bertuzzi scored his first goal of the game.

With the Ducks’ defense caught in the neutral zone, Bertuzzi gathered in a tip pass from Naslund and beat Giguere on a breakaway to put Vancouver ahead, 1-0, before the Ducks knew what hit them.

The Ducks should have been ready for a fast start from the Canucks, who’ve been criticized for their slow start this season.

“Criticism we’re receiving for our play thus far in the season is obviously very justified,” Coach Marc Crawford said before the game, referring to his team’s sub-.500 record.

“We have to be better than that. We know that we’re capable of better.”

Vancouver, which will play eight of its next 12 games at home after 11 road games last month, got a big lift with the return of center Andrew Cassels, who had been sidelined since Oct. 30 because of a knee injury.

With Cassels back, Crawford was able to move Trevor Linden to the No. 2 line.

The move paid off when Cassels assisted, with Naslund, on Bertuzzi’s first goal.

The Canucks had five shots on Giguere before the Ducks recorded their first on Cloutier 11:26 into the opening period.

Giguere got better as the game worn on.

He kept his team close with consecutive stops early in the second period on Brendan Morrison and Donald Brashear.

Later in the second period, the Ducks finally got on the scoreboard when defenseman Pavel Trnka floated a shot from the left point that deflected off Vancouver’s Artem Chubarov to tie the score, 1-1, 8:59 into the period.

Following Trnka’s first goal of the season, the Ducks took the play to the Canucks over the next five minutes.

But every good chance the Ducks had failed to find the net against Cloutier, who finished with 16 saves.

The Canucks capitalized on the Ducks’ missed shots when Bertuzzi dug the puck out of Vancouver’s zone and scored off Naslund’s second assist of the game, 16:13 into the second period on a four-on-four situation.

Naslund then added an insurance goal on a power play 12 minutes into the third period to put Vancouver ahead, 3-1.

Marty McInnis scored for the Ducks with 2:08 remaining to finish the scoring.