Ketchup bottle. Chain reaction. Turning the corner. Getting their game back. Call it any of those or something else, the people following the Ducks this week have had their faith in their team restored. Somewhat. Their four leading scorers coming into Friday night...
Nashville might have been tired coming into Sunday evening against the Ducks, but hey, they’d played at 1pm Saturday, so it was more than a 24-hour turnaround to Sunday’s 5pm start. And, given the percentages which say that goalies on the second half of a back-to-back...
For the first week of the season in LA, it looked, in the immortal words of Ernest Thayer, like “there was no joy in Mudville.” Nothing was going right, and the hockey team wasn’t winning. People were starting to ask if the Sutter era was over. How silly that was is...
For a team that went all the way to within a game of the Stanley Cup finals last spring, the Ducks couldn’t look much less familiar, or a whole lot less skillful, than they do this fall. The lineup is full of new faces due to trades, losses in free agency, and injury....
Everyone else is running away from the LA Kings, with even the Minnesota Wild, not most people’s pick for the Central Division crown prior to the season. Heck, even in numbers, the Kings are lagging nearly everyone. Three games, no wins, two goals, twelve given up, no...
Awful. There’s little more to say about the LA Kings’ performance thus far this season. Blame one of several things, as fans and media members have done in LA this week. Pick from the goalie, players lagging on the system, or the line combinations. The team has an...
No miracles were forthcoming for LA on Wednesday night as they took a dispiriting loss to an energetic San Jose team to open the season. 5-1 was the final, and the numbers did no favors to LA. Twenty shots, though they gave up 32. On the power play, 0/6. More faceoff...
Francois Beauchemin left Anaheim for Colorado this summer, and one adage he followed was, “You can’t take it with you.” Anyway, not when “it” is your home. So, according to the OC Register of last weekend, he put his pad on the market. Knowing the details will remind...
Aside from the specifics of what happened in the Chicago-Ducks game Saturday night, which I detailed in my story “Down for the Three Count” at IH, other things stand out from this series. First, the Blackhawks were quite concerned to avenge last season’s game seven...
Three things needed to happen for the Ducks to win against Chicago Saturday night. Their coach needed to be smarter than the Blackhawks’ Quenneville. Their goalie had to be at least solid if not great. And their captain had to play better than he had, you could even...
One small lineup change shouldn’t make a huge difference to a team, but on Monday night, taking one guy out of the lineup (Etem) and inserting one other (Fleischmann) made a huge difference in mojo for the Anaheim Ducks. The home team also got major production from...
Chicago’s got problems on defense. Hard to imagine, but with only four serviceable players on the blueline, they were threatened if the Ducks came out Tuesday night and pounded them. Four men can only take so much. Of course, they dressed six, not four, but the final...
“Now the focus is off Andersen,” someone from the local Anaheim newspaper said this weekend. It didn’t take long for a bright LED spotlight to find the Ducks’ netminder again on Sunday afternoon. The first period of the Chicago-Ducks game was characterized by three...
“Don’t live in the world of what if,” my mother used to say. I was a worrier, and the more speculation I could entertain about what might happen, the happier I was. Her advice sought to rescue me from myself, and she was right. But just for a moment, I’m going to...
Bruce Boudreau never thought it was going to be easy. After all, he was trying to do something that he’d never done before, which was eliminate another team to end round two. He’d only ever been eliminated before. When he thought his team was going to win, he jumped...
What was supposed to be different on Sunday night for Calgary: their goalie (Ramo instead of Hiller), a returned defenseman (Raphael Diaz—didn’t happen), Hudler and Ferland out due to injury (Ferland sat, Hudler played). And, of course, the results. Nothing changed in...
The Flames can’t win in Anaheim. That’s what the radio experts were saying on the afternoon of the first game of the two teams’ second-round series. And it was true. The Flames have not won in the regular season in Anaheim since January of 2004. None of the current...
The atmosphere in Honda Center was better on Saturday than it had been Thursday night. There seemed to be both more Jets fans and more vociferous Ducks fans, perhaps one being causal of the other. The Jets started fast. The hitting was intense. And then they took some...
Boudreau’s exits from the playoffs. Winnipeg’s goalie magic. The Ducks’ goalie question mark. These hung over the first game of the Jets-Anaheim series which got off to a start at an Orange-County-unfamiliar time of 7:30pm Thursday night. Come to think of it, even the...
“Every single one of us is getting massacred/on a frozen path.” So say the Dears, a Montreal band, in their song, “Gang of Losers.” Sounds a lot like what’s happened to the NHL team in Los Angeles this season. They’ve won just 40 times, losing 27 and tying 15. Had...
Every time you turn around, the race for the last playoff spot in the West gets tighter. Saturday afternoon, Winnipeg beat Vancouver to sneak ahead of LA. Saturday night, the Kings had Colorado in town off a 4-2 win in Anaheim the night before. But just as Bruce...
The Anaheim Ducks have won all they need to at this point. In fact, this was true even before their game versus Colorado on Friday night. But with three games remaining—the Avs, Dallas, and then Arizona—they had the chance to pile up more points in anticipation of the...
The moaning about whether the Kings will make the playoffs this year is getting, quite frankly, pretty boring. Even if they don’t have success in the post-season, they, and their fans, have a lot to celebrate. But it’s hard to get that message through to people who...
Andy Andreoff scored the only goal of the game Monday night as LA beat the Coyotes. It was his first NHL goal. And you could see that on the bench after it, he was replaying the moment. Why not? It’s been a while in coming. And even he knows it. The single word he...
The Ducks played Nashville late Sunday afternoon to determine which team would pull ahead of the other in what had been earlier in the day a four-way tie for the top spot in the NHL. The other two clubs knotted at 93 were the Rangers and Montreal, neither of whom...
Hard to believe the following words: some of the greatest living hockey players in the world were in one place on Saturday night. That place was LA. And many of those players were former Kings. Think Gretzky, Blake, and Robitaille. But especially think Robitaille,...
Pittsburgh was just better for a couple of periods. That’s the story from Anaheim. And they didn’t rely on the guys you’d usually think to get it done. Instead, Patrick Hornqvist scored a pair of goals after Blake Comeau got the first one. That was all they’d need to...
The Montreal Canadiens use the strategy that the LA Kings did in 2011-12, the year they fired their old coach, got a new one, and won their first Stanley Cup. That strategy, suggested by Terry Murray and perfected by his successor in the playoffs, was simple: score...
Goalie matchups make sense when coaching decisions make sense. On Friday, or really, back to Thursday, Darryl Sutter’s choices made no sense. Why play your number one guy (Quick), against a quite likely weak team, when said weak team is coming off of a game the night...
What’ new in LALALand? The Kings traded away a first-round pick (if they make the playoffs this year) and a prospect (Roland McKeown) for a defenseman to shore up a blueline weakened by suspension (Voynov) and injury (Martinez). The new West Coaster will be Andrej...
