The Ducks are currently missing Cam Fowler (nine games) and Hampus Lindholm (five games). Josh Manson was recently also hurt (two games) but is back. In the lineup was Jani Hakanpaa, who was playing his third game of the year and third of his career. He is Finnish,...
Rookie mistakes are part of having a young squad. That was a bit of a theme Saturday afternoon when the Minnesota Wild visited Staples Center for a game against the Kings. First-period examples included Blake Lizotte taking a high-sticking penalty in the offensive...
The Kings have lots to play for, if spoiling other teams’ chances counts. This started a few nights ago as they began a team-high (tie) nine straight home games that stretch through March 20. With 58 points coming into Thursday night and sixteen games to go, a perfect...
Compared to the flurry of activity that the Ducks saw this trade deadline week, the Kings were quiet. In fact, the LA team had just one new player in the lineup, in the person of Trevor Moore. He wasn’t even that new, having come over from Toronto early in February in...
The Ducks had their busiest trade deadline day in club history this week. And the players they got featured the first game out—Tuesday at Honda Center with the Oilers in town. Five new faces adorned the lineup: Sonny Milano (Columbus), Danton Heinen (Boston), Andrew...
Let’s be real: the Ducks ain’t buying this week at the trade deadline. They’re selling. Ondrej Kase went away to Boston. Rumours have other players (Derek Grant) leaving by the time the lunch bell rings in Anaheim Monday. 12pm Pacific is the deadline for moving...
Continuing to play “who’s here and who’s gone” with the Kings, let’s take a moment to mourn the departure of Alec Martinez. Why? Fans loved him, if not quite as much as they adore Kopitar, Doughty, Brown, and Quick. But “Marty” was right up there, and the memories...
So let’s play the same game with the Anaheim Ducks as we did with the LA Kings last night. It’s called “who is missing?” And the answers start with Ondrej Kase. And end with Ondrej Kase. He’s a Bruin. Only there are some oddities about it. He was injured and didn’t...
Out with the old, in with the (kinda) new. That’s the phrase that’s guiding the LA Kings as this, their most disastrous season in decades, slowly sinks into the sea. They’re currently 21-34-5, and who’s gone? Their scrappy fourth-liner, Kyle Clifford. A fan favorite,...
If following a hockey team is kinda like being in on the gossip in a small town, then Ducks fans have a few things to whisper about with the Stars in town on Thursday evening. Guys coming, guys going, new hopes for injury recovery. The power play. Forget I said that...
We’ve covered this before: there’s not a lot of reason to concern oneself with the LA Kings this season. Like all clubs, and especially those that have had success in the salary cap era, they have been forced to rebuild. On a daily basis, they make progress towards...
Maybe you’re bored with rundowns of the Ducks’ lineup. Well, if someone would just tell Dallas Eakins not to put his forwards in a blender every night, I’d stop writing about what he’s doing. But here we go again with the Rangers in Anaheim for a 1pm contest Saturday....
Kings-Ducks might not now be what it once was. The Freeway Faceoff hype has worn off. Neither team is making a dent in the league this year. So the crowd on Thursday night (the Ducks almost never play at home on this night, so that too is a surprise) was sparse at...
The Rangers came to Los Angeles, drawing out fans from New York for a Tuesday evening contest at Staples Center. Take the game as the Kings played it as a bit of a preview of their Thursday contest against the Ducks, and you might think they’ll bound in to Anaheim and...
You can’t spot Washington a goal and expect good things to happen, but that’s exactly what the LA Kings did in their 7pm start on Wednesday against the Caps. Too bad, because the Kings came out and controlled the game over the first few minutes, looking confident and...
On the surface, mixing lines all up works. That might have been Anaheim Coach Dallas Eakins’ lesson on Monday night with the Kings in town. His line mixing and mingling continued as it has over the past weeks, and his team won a strong 4-2 game. Look closer. The...
Most nights, hockey makes sense. The better team gets the better chances, because they generate them. The weaker team hopes to pull off a miracle. Sometimes they do it. Fans go home happy when their team is the one who does the latter. That was the LA Kings peeps on...
While everyone else was shopping, hockey fans were gathering at 1pm at Honda Center on Friday. But what’s to say about the Anaheim Ducks, who lost 3-0 during a game that’s become a local tradition? The overall message from the players and coach after? We need to...
If the Ducks were looking to respond to a three-game winless streak and an admission from their Captain, Ryan Getzlaf, that his team had quit on the game when playing the Lightning in Tampa Bay on Saturday, they didn’t do much to show it starting out their game with...
Why are the Arizona as good as they are? They’re sitting second in the Pacific Division, and they’ve got 14 more goals than they’ve given up. Their offensive total coming out of Saturday is 68 goals for. They are only middling in both PK and PP, but they have 30...
Overheard on the elevator on the way to the dressing rooms after the Kings beat the Edmonton Oilers 5-1 Thursday night at Staples Center: “I knew they [the Oilers] were sleepy on the second shift.” This from a hockey insider, and he was right. From the get-go, the...
Kyle Clifford in a cowboy hat. That’s what greeted fans on the LA Kings website Saturday, along with the announcement that it was “country Music Day.” Anything to sell tickets, I guess, but to whom? Honestly, I don't even know if there is a country music station in...
The Ducks lost to San Jose, who have now won five in a row. If you like the Ducks, that’s disappointing. But it’s not all bad. What the Ducks did right, period one: they scored early, on a pure skill goal by Rickard Rakell. He took the puck on the right side with a...
“Nobody comes to the rink to stay close or to have moral victories.” That was Todd McLellan’s pronouncement after the Kings won Tuesday night, and a good one. But that leaves a question: What’s a bad hockey team? Let’s venture some answers. One that doesn’t score...
Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. That seemed to be the mantra of the night at the Ducks home arena on Sunday night with Edmonton in town. One indication—the number of penalties taken by both teams. The Ducks had four and the Oilers five. None were for more than two minutes. An...
If nothing-nothing can be interesting, then period one in Anaheim on Tuesday night with the Wild in town was fascinating. The Ducks have said they want to start faster. They said that Friday. They did it Sunday. They still found themselves down 2-0 to Chicago and had...
The Anaheim Ducks have played 2,000 games as a franchise. Ryan Getzlaf has appeared in exactly half of those, a record he achieved on Sunday night at home against Chicago. Memorable moments: raising the Stanley Cup after the 2006-07 season, his first full campaign. A...
As a misread metaphor, Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos) might have been better used for the LA Kings than the Anaheim Ducks as each team used the motif to promote its weekend games. The festival honors and celebrates the dead with “offrendas”—altars decorated to...
You might almost not recognize the Anaheim Ducks, if you dropped in from anytime around 2017 and saw them play the Vancouver Canucks Friday night at Honda Center. This in a game which came on the Mexican Day of the Dead, duly celebrated with, amongst other things, a...
Guys, guys, guys, you’ve gotta try harder, sooner. That’s the message Saint Mary’s men’s hockey coach Trevor Stienburg should have been giving his team after their 4-2 loss against Acadia on Wednesday night. His team worked the shots to 38-30, with some dangerous...
