Ducks show more progress in overtime loss to Flames
ANAHEIM — Even without leading scorer Troy Terry, the Ducks nearly pulled off yet another comeback as they forced overtime but fell just short in a 3-2 loss to the Calgary Flames on Tuesday night at Honda Center.
Alex Killorn and Mason McTavish had a goal apiece and John Gibson came up with 30 saves for the Ducks, who played much of the game with five defensemen. They have earned nine of their past 12 possible points.
Terry missed the match as he and his wife Dani were to welcome their second child.
Calgary’s MacKenzie Weegar, who turned 31 on Tuesday, scored a goal and assisted on another by Nazem Kadri before Jonathan Huberdeau tallied in overtime. Joel Hanley tacked on two assists. Former Tustin resident Dustin Wolf made 26 saves. Calgary also benefited from a pair of wonky bounces that bookended its scoring.
“We battled really hard, competed really hard too. That’s something we can lay our heads on at night,” McTavish said. “Obviously, we want to get the two points, but we’ll build on it for sure.”
A wild end-to-end sequence in overtime started when Calgary’s Martin Pospisil disrupted Jackson LaCombe’s partial breakaway to send the Flames the other way for a frantic fire drill in the Ducks’ zone. That pressure led to an interference penalty by Pavel Mintyukov, allowing Calgary to cash in four-on-three.
Anticlimax reigned during the penalty kill as, after an initial strong save by Gibson, a bad hop off the end boards from Jacob Trouba’s clearing attempt served up a tap-in goal at the side of the net for Huberdeau, 2:05 into OT.
“It was a wild one,” McTavish said. “I think it banked off the boards and pretty much right in front of the net. It was a tough one. That’s just the way it goes sometimes. We’ll get the next one.”
Leo Carlsson began the third period with a partial breakaway that was denied by Wolf’s blocker. Wolf, a former junior King, made a big stop on McTavish’s deflection in the second. Gibson returned the favor and then some, as Ducks coach Greg Cronin remarked that he tidied up chances off sloppy second-period line changes and breakouts gone awry in the third.
The Ducks broke through on the power play, tying the score 7:36 into the final frame. McTavish set up in the slot to redirect a high shot from Cutter Gauthier for his sixth goal of the season and his second on the power play. The Ducks have now made good on two of their past five power plays, reversing a much longer-standing trend: they had gone 4 for 46 with the man advantage entering the game, the second-worst percentage in the NHL since Dec. 2.
“It’s such a big part of our game, and obviously it hasn’t been great to start the year or in the first half,” McTavish said. “We’re working on it a lot, so it was nice to get a couple in the last couple games.”
With just under eight minutes to play, LaCombe barreled into Blake Coleman at the back post, knocking him off a rebound that would have been a near-certain goal, one of several prominent plays that pushed the contest to an extra session.
The second period saw the teams exchange goals at the 8:34 and 12:44 marks after Drew Helleson’s major penalty and game misconduct for kneeing Connor Zary, who did not return to the ice. Helleson was assessed a 5-minute penalty and was ejected, while the response from Calgary’s Jakob Pelletier earned him two minutes in the box.
“They’re playing one-on-one, and there’s no way that he was intentionally trying to hit him with the knee. I don’t think his skates ever came off the ice,” Cronin said. “I hope Zary’s OK, he’s a hell of a hockey player.”
Just as the four-on-four segment was about to expire, the Ducks equalized. Isac Lundeström found Killorn in the slot for a rising wrist shot from just inside the right circle that became his eighth goal of the year and his first in nine games.
Then, an offensive-zone faceoff win by Kadri allowed him to slip behind the defense and receive a silky pass from Weegar for a redirection goal at the back post, after which he pointed to his mother Sue in the suite that the Flames filled for their moms’ trip.
The Ducks allowed the first nine shots on goal of the evening but ended up with only a 12-11 deficit in shots through 20 minutes. That shot, however, was the difference, as Calgary scored a Rube Goldberg machine of a goal with 55.9 seconds on the first-period clock.
Hanley’s low-flying wrist shot appeared to nick the stick of Ducks forward Ross Johnston before it was tipped by Coleman and, finally, it banked in off the body of Weegar.
“The first one, holy smokes, I think it hit like three different things before it went in,” Cronin said.
Blips abounded before a sellout crowd, both from stretches of suspect game management and poor puck luck, leaving the Ducks with one point before heading off on a season-long, six-game road trip.
“It was a tight-checking, playoff-type of game. The crowd was awesome,” Cronin said. “(The Flames) came out and they had like (nine) shots to none. They put everything deep and threw it at the net. After we got through that, it was just a back-and-forth game.”