Luongo wrongly takes blame

Roberto Luongo stopped shots with his toes.

The Vancouver Canucks’ splendid goaltender, determined Thursday to prevent the Ducks from eliminating his team in Game 5 of the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs, repelled shots with his chest, his throat, his stick, his arms and, it sometimes seemed, with sheer will.

When he had an equipment problem and couldn’t come out for the start of the first overtime period, his magic rubbed off on his backup, Dany Sabourin, who stopped five shots in 3 minutes 34 seconds.

But it’s the last of the 58 shots Luongo faced that will haunt him the rest of this spring and all summer, because it was the one that allowed the Ducks to advance to the Western Conference finals and ended the Canucks’ spirited playoff run well before he’d dreamed it might conclude.

Seeing Rob Niedermayer check Canucks forward Jannik Hansen into the boards out near the Vancouver blue line, Luongo allowed his attention to wane for the briefest of moments. He didn’t see the puck slide loose and over to Scott Niedermayer, whose quick shot found its way past Luongo 4:30 into the second overtime and gave the Ducks a 2-1 victory.

“It’s cruel, sometimes, this game,” Canucks forward Brendan Morrison said.

If it was a cruel outcome for the Canucks, it was an unexpected bounty for the Ducks. They got nothing from their top two lines but a handful of penalties; their third and fourth lines produced both goals and gave them the energy to persevere in the face of Luongo’s relentless excellence.

“We deserved that win,” said Ducks goalie Jean-Sebastien Giguere, who faced only 27 shots.

“Roberto gave them a chance to win tonight. Playing like that, at the end of the day, you deserve to win.

“You’ve got to give him credit. He never quit. He gave them a chance to stay alive, but at the end of the day it comes down to how we played, and when you play like that you put all the chances on your side.”

And because Luongo took a chance and allowed his focus to falter, he was in the losing locker room.

“After the hit, I thought it was an elbow and I looked at the ref for a split second,” said Luongo, who had never advanced to the playoffs in his previous six NHL seasons.

“When I turned my head, the puck was coming and I couldn’t stop it. It was a mistake that I made there and it cost us the game.”

His teammates recoiled at the thought that Luongo would assume blame for a loss that they were so sure would be averted.

“Without him, we wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t have gotten this far,” Morrison said. “By no means is this his fault.”

That may make sense to him in a day or week or month from now. It didn’t register Thursday.

After comprehending that the puck had eluded this most formidable and fearless of goaltenders, the crowd of 17,407 at the Honda Center erupted in roars and the Ducks sprinted off the bench to celebrate their second consecutive trip to the conference finals. Luongo remained on his knees for several seconds, disconsolate, then regained his composure in time to join the handshake line.

“It’s a bit surreal,” he said. “It’s a disappointment because your season is over. I don’t feel like I deserve the season to be over. I wanted to keep going.”

It stopped because of Scott Niedermayer’s wise decision to simply put the puck on net and hope for the best, a result he got. Niedermayer was sure that Luongo had been surprised by the quickness of the shot hurtling toward him.

“I’m not going to beat him with that shot if he sees it,” the veteran defenseman said.

Luongo stopped slap shots and wrist shots, long shots, point-blank shots and deflections. With every swipe of his glove or kick of his pads, he showed why he is a finalist for three major NHL trophies this season.

On Tuesday, the league announced that Luongo is among three finalists for the Hart trophy, given to the NHL’s most valuable player, the Vezina trophy, awarded to the top goaltender, and the Lester B. Pearson award, awarded by players to the one among them they judge to be the most outstanding. He is that good, and more.

On Thursday, and over a five-game series, the Ducks were that much better.

“Everybody played pretty well tonight,” Giguere said. “When your fourth line comes out and gives other guys a rest, that’s a big help.”

Luongo may win one of those trophies for which he has been nominated. It wouldn’t be a travesty if he won all three.

But it’s the Ducks who get to go on and compete for the most meaningful trophy of all, the Stanley Cup.

Undoubtedly, Luongo would have traded all of those nominations and all of those 56 saves for that chance.

Helene Elliott can be reached at helene.elliott@latimes.com. For previous columns by Elliott, go to latimes.com/elliott.