Juggling, Jiggy and Rejuvenation

The Mighty Ducks changed goaltenders, their line combinations and the Edmonton Oilers’ party plans.

The Ducks’ 6-3 victory altered the course of the Western Conference finals, denying the Oilers the sweep that a loud, vibrant sellout crowd of 16,839 at Rexall Place had implored the hometown team to deliver.

The Ducks ended the Oilers’ seven-game playoff winning streak Thursday with a forceful performance, taking 25 shots in the first period and getting enough pucks past Dwayne Roloson to reduce him, in their minds, from superhuman to merely mortal. Jean-Sebastien Giguere, in goal for the Ducks for the first time since Ilya Bryzgalov replaced him April 29, yielded three goals on the first nine shots he faced but yielded not an inch on the last 14 shots.

“It’s not the best situation when you haven’t played for a month. It doesn’t matter if you ride the bike real hard. Nothing duplicates a playoff game,” Giguere said. “But it was easy to be motivated for this game.”

In winning in Edmonton for the first time since 1999, the Ducks might simply have delayed the inevitable for the Oilers, who won the first two games of the series in Anaheim and can close it out there Saturday.

“We got a lesson,” Oilers Coach Craig MacTavish said. “We’ve got to turn the tide in Anaheim.”

That there’s a tide at all is encouraging for the Ducks, who had insisted they were not disappointed in their previous efforts in the series, only in the results.

After being held to a single goal in each of the first two games, they scored four goals in the third period of their 5-4 loss Tuesday. Their ability on Thursday to score the first goal for the first time in the series and force the Oilers to open up was another key change, an element that the Oilers hadn’t dealt with before.

“We found a crack in the armor,” Ducks Coach Randy Carlyle said.

They found it because they refused to stop looking, refused to stop playing until they could say they’d given their best and could give no more.

“We could have easily just packed it in and said, ‘We’re down 3-0, we’re on the road. It’s an uphill battle no matter what,’ ” center Todd Marchant said.

“But this team said, ‘You know what, we’re going to go out there and throw everything at them. We’re going to give it all that we have and see what happens.’ ”

They gave the Oilers a new target in Giguere. He was not the acrobat who was voted the most valuable player of the Ducks’ 2003 run to the Stanley Cup finals, but he blunted the Oilers’ second-period comeback attempt, holding firm after an unchecked Georges Laraque beat him at 10:01 to cut the Ducks’ lead to 4-3.

Bryzgalov hadn’t played poorly in the first three games, Carlyle said. He made the change because he said he believed that Giguere would respond to this most urgent of challenges.

“Jiggy played well,” defenseman Sean O’Donnell said, “and he’s the one that brought us here.”

Said Ruslan Salei: “Who isn’t nervous if you haven’t played for a month? It’s a lot of pressure, but I thought he handled it pretty well.”

For Giguere, it was a matter of keeping this season alive, giving the Ducks another chance to see where fate leads them.

“I wanted to play badly, but at the same time I didn’t want bad things to happen to our team,” Giguere said. “It’s one of those things, you don’t want to be selfish. The team goes before yourself and stuff like that.”

Carlyle gave the Ducks a new look in other ways, sending out a dizzying variety of line combinations. He moved Joffrey Lupul to the right side with Chris Kunitz and Andy McDonald for several shifts, and put Lupul with Kunitz and Ryan Getzlaf for others. Teemu Selanne, usually on the right side with Kunitz and McDonald, played instead with big-bodied Dustin Penner and the veteran Marchant.

All of those moves paid off.

Penner scored the first two goals, with help from Selanne, and Getzlaf scored the third on a one-timer off a clever pass from McDonald. Lupul, reunited with former linemates Marchant and Penner in yet another switch, scored the crucial fifth goal at 18:22 of the second period and scored into an empty net with 1:10 to play.

“Obviously, we had to change a little something just to mix it up a little bit,” Getzlaf said. “The line combinations were working, and we’re going to try to continue that.

“Our goal was to come out and throw everything we had at them and see where we stood. With a three-goal lead we were pretty comfortable and continued from there.

“We’re going to build from it. We’re taking this momentum and we’re going to try to carry it over to the next game.”

Maybe they can. Maybe they’ll defend as vigorously as they did in the early going Thursday and will continue to poke the puck off Oilers sticks and make a shambles of the Oilers’ forecheck. Maybe they’ll continue to bedevil the Oilers into making mistakes in the defensive end and will beat Roloson often enough to make this task slightly less impossible than it seemed after Game 3.

“The puck just seems to be finding our sticks now. Guys are finding rebounds. In the first three games, they just seemed to bounce away,” defenseman Scott Niedermayer said.

“The changes worked out well. Jiggy played well. The lines worked out well. I think we just realized the situation. We had to come out and play as hard as we could.”

They were realistic enough to realize that they still face a difficult task -- perhaps impossible. The road ahead, though shortened by one victory, is “the same thing really,” Niedermayer said.

Nonetheless, they haven’t reached the end of that road.

It’s still a daunting prospect, O’Donnell said, “if you think about trying to win three games in a row. This is a very good team, but we feel we can beat them Saturday and that’s all we have to do.

“We have to try and win that game Saturday and I don’t even know when those games are, 6 and 7.”

For the record, those games would be played Monday at Edmonton and Wednesday at Anaheim, if necessary. Those are the most important words in the Ducks’ vocabulary today: if necessary. Saturday’s game is necessary. So is a more satisfying conclusion to their season.