Ducks put on jolly good show

LONDON -- Home-ice advantage proved crucial in the Kings-Ducks London miniseries merely 5,456 miles from Los Angeles and 5,454 miles from Anaheim.

Where the Kings skated on Saturday night as the home club announced as your Los Angeles Kings, heard “I Love L.A.” after goals and won, 4-1, the Ducks took the ice Sunday night at O2 Arena as the home club announced as your 2007 champion Anaheim Ducks, heard Phantom Planet’s “California” at the conclusion and won, 4-1.

Where the public-addressed comforts of home abetted a 19-year-old Kings goaltender in his first NHL start Saturday night, the warm home trappings helped a 25-year-old Ducks goaltender in his first NHL start Sunday night.

Was looking forward to this since he was a kid, Jonas Hiller said.

Then again, the Kings’ Jonathan Bernier played last season in Maine and the Ducks’ Hiller played last season in Davos, Switzerland, so maybe it’s just that the Ducks recognized they are an elite hockey club and made some hockey alterations from Saturday to Sunday.

An elite hockey club wound up reminding Kings Coach Marc Crawford that there is another level to get to, and the Ducks found that level.

And the dogged Ducks coaches, having spent part of a London weekend in that time-honored British tradition of watching hockey film, tinkered even with a cliche: If it wasn’t broken, then why did I try to fix it, went coach Randy Carlyle’s thinking.

Carlyle resumed the Ryan Getzlaf-Corey Perry pairing from which he had strayed, saw his players get into the dirty areas of the ice, beamed at their good grind, cycling game that seems to be the mandate for the Ducks to have success, and watched them lend uplift a sadistic travel schedule.

Any team coming from Anaheim to London toward a scheduled touchdown in Detroit at 2 a.m. today, and with games at Detroit on Wednesday, at Columbus on Friday and at Pittsburgh on Saturday can use some uplifts.

Even as Carlyle spoke, the players on the jet lag express flushed out lactic acid.

Well, that’s what he said.

“We’ll have tomorrow off and we’ll have a team dinner tomorrow night,” he said, “and we think that allowing them that amount of time and letting them just try to cool down and have the proper flush, the proper nutrition and hydration, make sure those things take place.

“We take that seriously. The players are on the bikes right now flushing the lactic acid out. Those are things we implement. If they don’t want to do it, we make them do it.”

Lactic-acid flush doubtless improves when you’ve just played commanding hockey, and the Ducks looked clearheaded from the get-go. Perry’s goal 10:49 into the first period seared upward, dislodged goaltender Jason LaBarbera’s water bottle and rewarded a carefully constructed power play.

Chris Kunitz flipped in a power-play goal at 15:19 after the Ducks got the puck into a dirty area and a convention of players battled for it pretty much in LaBarbera’s pores.

Once Perry played a carom off the boards behind goal to flip it in deftly for 3-0 in the second period, and Rob Niedermayer had assisted Travis Moen on some competent stuff for 4-0, the Ducks looked like the Ducks even given their makeover.

“I think we learned a lot about ourselves today, rebounding from that effort we had yesterday, the bad mistakes,” Chris Pronger said.

“We kind of took over the game today, and to be able to rebound the way we did shows a lot about this team.”

So as another pilot started another engine, it all had made a memory for Hiller, who came Duck-ward last May 25 after a recommendation from Swiss hockey school director Francois Allaire, and who stopped every shot except Mike Cammalleri’s second-period wonder that whirred its way through a wee gap between Hiller and the right post.

He did this in front of a good bevy of Swiss family and friends. In fact, he’d played almost at home.