Cup defense, like Ducks’ defense, is a flop

DALLAS -- One moment, they were the defending Stanley Cup champions.

The next, just another losing team on the wrong side of the handshake line at the end of a playoff series.

The Ducks’ reign ended Sunday with a 4-1 loss to the Dallas Stars, six games into the first round. The seeds for its demise were planted soon after it began, when they endured a short summer, a long wait for Teemu Selanne and Scott Niedermayer to return from retirement, and an impossible quest to find the drive that fueled them last spring.

“When you have won there’s a little bit [of] satisfaction inside your body. You try hard but when you’re a little bit off here and there, that’s why you can’t win,” Selanne said.

“You need every player’s commitment and work ethic and all the tools every player can bring. If you can’t, even if you’re off a little bit here and there, you can’t do it.”

The Ducks had prolonged the series by winning at Anaheim on Friday, and for a while Sunday they seemed determined to push it to the limit, to a seventh game at home.

But their offense misfired -- again -- their discipline evaporated -- again -- and their penalty killing was helpless. The Stars converted 10 of 38 advantages in the series; the Ducks capitalized on only five of 24 power plays.

“In the playoffs everything kind of fell short in our overall game,” goaltender Jean-Sebastien Giguere said.

“I don’t know what the answer is.”

The two goals Dallas scored 52 seconds apart early in the third period to take a 2-1 lead might as well have been 20, so feeble was the Ducks’ offense.

They didn’t take a shot for a span of 23 minutes 58 seconds, from 4:49 of the second period to 8:47 of the third.

“We were doing things OK and then they come in with those two quick goals and it changes the game right around,” Niedermayer said. “That’s the fine line you walk when you’re in that situation.”

They had played most of the season with that fine line. On Sunday, as in losing the first two games of this series at home, they made too many errors.

That, too, wasn’t a new problem.

When Niedermayer returned and General Manager Brian Burke had to make salary-cap space for him this season and next, Burke had to choose between trading center Andy McDonald or defenseman Mathieu Schneider. He dealt McDonald, the team’s top playoff goal scorer last spring, so he could keep his defense intact.

That was the wrong decision, not only because the Ducks lost McDonald’s playmaking and scoring but because Schneider is incurably soft and untrustworthy defensively. Those failings were never better typified than when he let Stephane Robidas get past him along the right-wing boards and set up Stu Barnes for Dallas’ second goal.

Robidas is a hard-nosed player -- actually, a broken-nosed player after he took a shot in the face in Game 5 and protected it with a cage Sunday -- but he’s a journeyman.

“He had the series of his life,” said teammate Mattias Norstrom, who will advance to the second round of the playoffs for the first time since 2001, when he was with the Kings team that upset Detroit and took Colorado to seven games. “We deserve credit as a group for how we played.”

The Ducks’ multimillion-dollar defense certainly didn’t play like one.

The Stars’ defense did, even though injuries took away the creativity and experience of Philippe Boucher and Sergei Zubov and thrust three rookies into intense, learn-on-the-job situations.

“I wouldn’t say we outplayed them, but everybody chipped in,” said Robidas, who outscored everyone on the Ducks with his goal and six points in the series. “Our identity is to play well as a team, and you’ve got to give credit to the young guys. And to Marty Turco who made some big saves, and our forwards for coming back.”

To the end, the Ducks believed they’d be back in the finals, that they’d find their lost discipline, clean up the other messy parts of their game and take a good run at becoming the first repeat champion since the Detroit Red Wings of 1997-98.

Only afterward, as they realized there’s no practice today and no more games this week or this season, did they acknowledge they simply lacked the determination that allowed them to triumph last spring.

“When you’re off a little bit here or there, in the big picture it’s a lot,” said Selanne, who promised to decide in the next month or so whether he will return for another season and not leave the team hanging again.

“We tried hard but today we didn’t deserve it.

“It’s unbelievably hard to win. A lot of people don’t understand what it takes in this league to win. We didn’t do things as good as we probably could, and in the big picture it’s huge.”

On Friday, after helping the Ducks win Game 5, Selanne had said there had to be a happy ending to his return. It was another miscalculation.

“This,” he said, “is not a happy ending.”

Helene Elliott can be reached at helene.elliott@latimes.com.

To read previous columns by Elliott, go to latimes.com/elliott.