Ducks edge Flames in shootout
ANAHEIM — Another game meant another rally for the Ducks as they came from behind once more on Sunday, when they trailed for most of the match but edged the Calgary Flames, 3-2 in a shootout, at Honda Center.
The Ducks, who are now 7-0-0 in shootouts this season, have won 12 of their past 14 games. Calgary had been shut out by the Kings 25 hours earlier in a game that snapped its two-game win streak and began a two-game winless streak.
Cutter Gauthier scored a pair of goals to stretch his team-topping total to 28. Lukáš Dostál repelled 32 pucks.
Joel Farabee and Yegor Sharangovich each had a goal for Calgary. Devin Cooley made 34 stops.
In the shootout, Leo Carlsson’s silky backhand was matched by Nazem Kadri’s rising wrister. The winner came from Mason McTavish, who executed a slowed-down version of his patented move that finished with a shot through the wickets of Cooley.
“We hung in there, got a big power-play goal late in the third, there was some excitement late in the game, and then overtime was exciting, and the shootout was (McTavish’s) moment,” Coach Joel Quenneville said. “It’s pretty amazing how he makes that move. I still don’t know how he does it; he’s very creative.”
Cooley, who experienced that ingenuity firsthand but may not have seen it coming — despite McTavish going to that well regularly — offered some insight.
“He gets really close, and then you’re like ‘oh, when do I go down or when do I not go down?’ Then, he tries to go around you, and you’re already down, and then he cuts it back,” Cooley said. “It was pretty sneaky by him, that’s definitely a sneaky move. I should have watched some video on him, I think.”
In the final 2:48 of overtime, Beckett Sennecke nearly ended the game off a partial breakaway with Calgary’s Kadri and the Ducks’ Ryan Poehling also got involved.
The Flames appeared to be content to go to a shootout until Kadri drove the net and tested Dostál with a backhand bid. At the other end, Poehling nearly scored in tight, and Morgan Frost interfered with Jacob Trouba. On the resulting truncated power play, Gauthier’s buzzer-beating bid for a hat trick didn’t go, sending the affair to a shootout, where the Ducks have been flawless.
“We always talk about (the shootout), I work with the (skaters), and they work with me,” Dostál said. “There’s kind of a bond between us, because we know it’s important. When we get to that position, we have to capitalize.”
As pressure mounted, the Ducks drew a penalty against Calgary captain Mikael Backlund and cashed in on the man advantage. After some early miscues, they scored nearly halfway through the infraction off a Gauthier one-timer from the right dot with 9:19 left in regulation.
The hosts and visitors swapped goals in the second period, with the Ducks tying the game at 11:14 and retroceding the lead 4:56 later. They threatened, thanks in part to a late power play, but went into the second intermission down 2-1.
As a Flames power play wound down, Sharangovich, who had withstood pressure from two penalty killers to start a puck reversal, got it back in the right circle. There, he maneuvered inside of Pavel Mintyukov to open a shooting lane for a far-side, go-ahead goal.
The Ducks had squared up the score by way of a funky goal from Gauthier. He set a pick on Kadri in the neutral zone and burst forth to follow up Carlsson’s shot attempt with one shot on net, then a second and finally a third from below the goal line that ricocheted off Cooley’s mask and back before entering the net.
“I can’t say I’ve ever scored a goal like that,” Gauthier said.
In the first period, Farabee was at the center of the action. His interference with Dostál drew a crowd in the corner and a penalty against Calgary, but it was Farabee himself scoring the only goal of the frame.
As the Flames regrouped in the neutral zone, Farabee came off the bench for Adam Klapka and skated unimpeded from the red line to the netfront, where his redirection gave Calgary the lead 9:41 after the opening draw.
“The penalty and all that kind of got me into the game,” Farabee said. “On the goal, something that’ll never come up on the scoresheet was (Klapka’s) change … he made the decision to come off and it let me come on the ice with a lot of speed.”
On deck for the Ducks awaits the Colorado Avalanche, the NHL’s best team by record this season.