Latest Ducks defeat has an all-too-familiar theme
Max Comtois skated out of Ducks coach Dallas Eakins’ doghouse and went right to the front of the net. He waited for a pass from teammate Ryan Getzlaf that only he seemed to know was coming in the closing seconds Wednesday at Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota.
The pass was on target. The shot wasn’t. Comtois’ point-blank try struck the right goal post and ricocheted away, a tidy summary of all that was right and all that was wrong with the Ducks’ play during a 3-2 loss to the Minnesota Wild, their third in a row and seventh in the past eight games. The Wild won their 10th straight home game.
“It looked like one of those things that seems to happen every day now,” Comtois said, bemoaning the Ducks’ lack of puck luck. “Just an unlucky bounce. (Getzlaf) fooled everybody in the rink. ‘Getzy’ finds those lanes. I read the play and he made a great pass. It’s just unfortunate
Up next: that it didn’t go in.”
Earlier, Comtois scored 22 seconds into the second period to tie the score 2-2, converting a pass from Isac Lundestrom for his team-leading 10th goal this season but his first in 10 games. Eakins scratched Comtois from Monday’s 2-1 loss to the Wild, saying his “game had fallen off.”
Derek Grant scored a first-period goal for the Ducks, who played their league-leading 22nd onegoal game of the season. They are 7-9-6 in one-goal games.
Ryan Getzlaf helped to set up Grant’s goal, the 701st assist of his career. He also moved within 10 points of Teemu Selanne’s franchise record of 988 points. Late in the second period, Getzlaf rang a shot off the crossbar that would have broken a 2-2 tie.
Nico Sturm’s tiebreaking goal happened only because of a rare misplay by Ducks goaltender Ryan Miller, who has probably covered a rolling puck into his crease hundreds if not thousands of times in his Hall of Fame-caliber career.
This time, Miller failed to freeze the puck. Sturm arrived ahead of the pack of Ducks’ defenders and tapped the loose puck into the net to give the Wild a 3-2 lead at 7:01 of the second period. Jared Spurgeon scored twice for Minnesota, which swept the two-game set.
“I’m not going to lie, it’s hard, it’s extremely tough,” Eakins said of the Ducks’ latest loss. “We had all of our guys, to a man, work their tails off. They were very in-sync in a lot of the game. I have very little issues with our play. I thought we played hard and we played smart.”
Miller started in place of injured No. 1 goalie John Gibson for the fifth consecutive game and for the sixth game in a row overall. Eakins said Gibson “was getting better every day” from an unspecified lower body injury. Miller is likely to start again Friday, when the Ducks face the St. Louis Blues.
Five players were unavailable to play after they were placed on the NHL’s COVID-19 protocol list: Danton Heinen, Ben Hutton, Jacob Larsson and Anthony Stolarz of the Ducks and Zach Parise of the Wild. There are several reasons why players are put on the list, including positive tests.
The Ducks’ players were quarantined in their hotel and the team altered its travel plans, staying overnight rather than flying immediately after the game to St. Louis. Eakins said the four players on the COVID-19 list would be tested again today and he hoped they would be cleared to play.