Carlsson gets first career goal in Ducks' loss to Stars
ANAHEIM ❯❯ The future may belong to any one of several promising prospects in this year's NHL draft, but Thursday's match at Honda Center was Leo Carlsson's alone as the Ducks center and this year's No. 2 overall pick scored a goal in his NHL debut.
Despite the emotion surrounding Carlsson, the Ducks fell 3-2 at Honda Center to the Dallas Stars, a legitimate contender in the West that reached the Stanley Cup Final in 2020 and the Western Conference Finals last season.
Carlsson factored into the Ducks' first score by creating traffic at the net front and buried a pass off the rush from Troy Terry, who also scored the Ducks' first goal. John Gibson turned away 21 bids.
Miro Heiskanen has been the engine for the Stars since his arrival in Dallas and he delivered a game-winning goal and two power-play assists Thursday. Joe Pavelski notched a goal and an assist and his linemate Roope Hintz also scored a goal. Jake Oettinger made 27 saves.
Carlsson's goal came just 61 seconds into the third period, knotting the game at two. Terry stripped Jamie Benn in the Ducks' zone and carried the puck across three lines before slipping the puck across to Carlsson for a no-doubt, topshelf wrist shot past an outstretched Oettinger.
With 9:33 to play, Carlsson nearly came up with his second equalizer of the night, but his wrist shot was denied by Oettinger.
If that seemed anticlimactic, Heiskanen's go-ahead goal elevated the word's meaning to new heights as his attempted centering pass became an own-goal (credited to Heiskanen) off the stick of Ducks defenseman Cam Fowler.
While Thursday's game may have helped close a bit of the gap between the first and second picks in this year's draft — Chicago's Connor Bedard's scouting report has every superlative but “messianic” and he went first overall — it did little to close the gap between first and second periods that the Ducks often displayed last season under coach Greg Cronin's predecessor Dallas Eakins.
They out-shot Dallas 17-7 and headed into the first intermission with a 1-0 advantage. But they were shelled by 12-1 in shots on goal in the second, leaving them trailing 2-1 through 40 minutes.
The Ducks' top trio opened the scoring less than five minutes into the match when a Trevor Zegras onetimer from the blue line generated a rebound that popped directly to Terry for a putback goal, his first tally of the season. Had the rebound gone to the other side, it would likely have been Carlsson's first goal. While he had to settle for a plus-one, rookie defenseman Pavel Mintyukov achieved a milestone with his first NHL assist.