Ducks Find Themselves Stuck in Coyote Hole

The Mighty Ducks skated as if through quicksand to start Friday’s game against the Phoenix Coyotes. They handled the puck as if it were toxic. They found themselves down by two goals after only two shifts.

“I guess we haven’t run out of bullets yet,” Coach Guy Charron said after the Ducks’ 4-3 loss before an announced crowd of 14,280 at the Arrowhead Pond.

The Ducks continued to fill their feet with lead, turning almost every mistake into a goal for the opposition. It happened twice in the game’s opening two shifts and the Ducks surrendered goals to Shane Doan and Juha Ylonen in a club-record 1:11.

“Our team can’t afford to do that,” Charron said.

In the end, it hardly mattered that the Ducks outplayed the Coyotes for long stretches and narrowly missed scoring a tying goal in the game’s closing seconds.

It didn’t matter that the Ducks created numerous scoring chances despite playing without injured forwards Paul Kariya, Mike Leclerc and Steve Rucchin.

Nor did it matter that Jean-Sebastien Giguere was solid in making 23 saves in his second consecutive start.

“We put him behind the eight ball right from the start,” Charron said of Giguere. “He fought through it. He wasn’t going to give up. He fought as well as he could under the circumstances.”

The Ducks’ mindless and flat-footed start overshadowed the sound 58-minute performance that followed. They scratched and clawed and got a third-period power-play goal from Teemu Selanne that had the fans roaring again after they showered the Ducks with boos in the opening minutes.

“That’s the positive side,” Charron said of the Ducks’ scrappy play after falling behind, 2-0. “The negative side is that we weren’t ready to play. Two shifts, two goals.”

On the opening shift, defenseman Vitaly Vishnevski lost control of the puck as the Ducks were skating out of the defensive zone. Jeremy Roenick fed the puck ahead to Keith Tkachuk, who was slowly making his way toward neutral ice.

Suddenly, Tkachuk was in prime scoring territory. Giguere denied Tkachuk with an excellent pad save at the left post. Tkachuk controlled the rebound and fed a centering pass to a hard-charging Shane Doan. Alone in the slot, Doan put the puck by Giguere at the 41-second mark.

On the next shift, Giguere and defenseman Pavel Trnka had an I-got-it, you-take-it moment behind the net. Phoenix’s Mika Alatalo gained control and fed a pass out front to an uncovered Juha Ylonen, who tapped the puck behind a scrambling Giguere at the 1:11 mark.

“There’s no excuse for that first minute or two,” defenseman Ruslan Salei said. “You’ve got to play 60 minutes. You’ve got to play it smart. We played a good game after that, but it’s not enough.”

In time, the Ducks would get their act together, cutting the deficit to 2-1 on Marty McInnis’ power-play goal with 3:39 left in the opening period.

But disaster struck again in the dying seconds of the period. Claude Lemieux’s simple dump-in turned into a fluke goal for Daniel Briere and a 3-1 Coyote lead with 27 seconds left in the first period.

It was impossible to blame the Ducks for this one, but someone in the organization might want to call maintenance about the funky bounce off the end boards.

Giguere moved smartly out of his net to play the puck after Lemieux sent it into the right corner. In a nanosecond, Giguere was skating into no-man’s land. The puck took a sharp and unexpected turn off the boards, away from Giguere and directly to Briere, who couldn’t have missed the back of the net if he tried.

Giguere gave up a second-period breakaway goal to Roenick at the 7:42 mark, but didn’t let another puck past him. Duck defenseman Oleg Tverdovsky countered at 15:23.

Selanne made things more interesting with his team-leading 17th goal 9:41 into the final period. He also set up center Matt Cullen for a glorious chance at the tying goal with Giguere on the bench in favor of a sixth skater.

But Selanne’s cross-ice pass handcuffed Cullen, who was stationed near the right post and looking at an open net after goalie Robert Esche was hopelessly out of position. Cullen stopped the puck with his skate, but couldn’t get it to his stick to score the tying goal with mere seconds remaining.