Ducks looking to reset against Wild and Jets
The Ducks went from rolling to reeling in short order, and now they'll ramble on to Minnesota today and then Manitoba on Friday for meetings with the Wild and Winnipeg Jets in a back-to-back set.
They'd won three of four games for just the second time since their early-season six-game winning streak. But they have now lost three straight by an aggregate score of 19-5 since a 2-1 victory over the Ottawa Senators on the same evening that they dealt Adam Henrique and Sam Carrick to Edmonton in their third trade this season that sent out roster talent for futures.
“When this stuff happens, there's an energy that comes in,” Ducks coach Greg Cronin said after the Ottawa game. “You lose people so you kind of mourn the loss of people, but then you get (new players) come in, and then people get an increased role, so they kind of get an opportunity to rebrand themselves as players. The issue with that is that it only lasts so long.”
Apparently, it lasted one game. The Ducks' following three matches saw them outclassed by an elite Dallas Stars squad, trampled all but effortlessly by the surging New York Islanders and then lit up by the NHL's worst team by points percentage on a night where Connor Bedard became the fifth 18-year-old in league history to put up five points in one night.
Brett Leason scored twice, giving the Ducks leads of 1-0 and 2-1 before they gave up five unanswered goals to Chicago, which had put up a touchdown on the Arizona Coyotes as well in a 7-4 win on Sunday. Leason has a modest eight goals on the season, but he has scored in spurts, having produced half those markers in a pair of multi-goal games and two more in his two-game goal streak to close February.
Cronin has been complimentary of Leason, highlighting his ability to become an anchor to the Ducks' third line, but also hoped that he'd play with “horns” to add an element of physicality to go along with his skill and 6-foot-5, 220-pound frame.
There was no shortage of jabs, both literal and figurative, during a brawl Tuesday in which rookie Pavel Mintyukov proved his mettle and all 12 players on the ice, goalies included, got involved.
The game was already 6-2 at that point, but the Ducks may be hoping to carry over some of that fighting spirit into their consecutive contests against bubble-riding Minnesota and playoffbound Winnipeg.
Minnesota made a different sort of aggressive move when it risked its point for reaching overtime in an effort to win a critical game against a team it was chasing desperately in the wild-card race, the Nashville Predators. During overtime, coach John Hynes pulled his goalie, despite the fact that an empty-net winner for Nashville would have erased the point his team had already earned. Minnesota scored with the extra attacker to secure two points and then won 4-1 over Arizona in its latest outing.
Winnipeg is in a race higher up in the Central Division, where two points separate three teams at the top. On Wednesday morning, the Jets sat two points behind Dallas and in a points tie with Colorado, on which Winnipeg holds two games in hand. They recently got a shutout victory from each of their goalies, Vezina candidate Connor Hellebuyck and backup Laurent Brossoit, between which they wedged a 5-0 loss to Vancouver that Rick Bowness called the Jets' worst loss in his two years behind their bench.
UP NEXT
Today: Ducks at Wild, 5p.m., BSW