Ducks hold tight for series lead
CHICAGO — They skated in mud with ankle weights on, their brains ticking over in slow motion: the tattered remains of two hockey teams who had put on a fabulous, six-period show two nights earlier.
So Thursday’s Game 3 of the Western Conference final had little of the razzledazzle of the first two games in Anaheim. All it had to offer was great goaltending by the Ducks’ Frederik Andersen, whose glove foiled most of the night’s best scoring chances, and a result: 2-1 Anaheim, in the game and the series.
Simon Despres, the big defenceman stolen at the trade deadline from the Pittsburgh Penguins for Ben Lovejoy, beat Corey Crawford for the game-winner with a onetimer from the right-wing boards 55 seconds from the end of the second period.
The Ducks got it to the house from there, if only barely, giving up a raft of scoring chances as the clock wound down, including Patrick Kane’s shot inside the final 10 seconds that caressed the outside of the post.
It’s just as well it didn’t go in; they’d have had to crawl back on the ice for overtime.
Game 4 goes Saturday and shapes up as a near mustwin for the Hawks.
Both teams, feeling the effects of triple-overtime in Game 2, began the evening looking as fuzzy as the ice in United Center.
They had talked a good game earlier, about fatigue not being a factor, but it quite clearly was. The players committed egregious giveaways, overskated pucks, neither gave nor received passes crisply and spent an inordinate amount of time trying to make the puck lie flat.
“At the end of the day, you had two tired teams out there,” said the Ducks’ Andrew Cogliano. “I don’t think the pace was as high as it was in the first two games.
“I thought both teams looked tired and we were the ones that did a good job of persevering.”
Chicago coach Joel Quenneville tried for some fresh legs, sitting Teuvo Teravainen and Antoine Vermette and dressing Kris Versteeg and Joakim Nordstrom, but the changes didn’t produce the desired result.
The Ducks were first to get some joy out of the sluggish proceedings, Patrick Maroon deflecting a Hampus Lindholm point shot under Crawford on the power play at 12:55 with Marian Hossa in the box.
But after a dispiriting first 19 minutes, during which they had utterly wasted a four-minute power play — Jakob Silfverberg’s double minor for high-sticking Jonathan Toews — the Blackhawks equalized on a mixup by the Ducks’ Rickard Rakell and Matt Beleskey in the high slot and the ever dangerous Kane pounced on the freebie, spinning and backhanding the puck past Andersen’s blocker with 57 seconds left in the period.
Despres’s winning goal came not long after a crazy sequence in which Corey Perry, racing away on a twoon-one with Maroon, broke his stick at his own blueline, skated past the Anaheim bench and grabbed a new twig — amazingly one of his own swiftly produced by equipment man Doug Shearer — took the pass in full stride crossing the blueline and fired a shot that Crawford had to save.
Seconds later, Getzlaf fed Despres, the big captain’s second point of the night and 14th assist of the postseason, tying his own franchise record set in 2009.