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...
The Wings had their Monday night game with Anaheim well in hand. They were ahead by a pair of goals, and they were continuing to dominate the play towards the end of the second period. But then the Ducks came to life, and they got up by a 3-2 score after having been...
The Anaheim Ducks romped through the West of Canada (in a kind of mini way) on the weekend, winning games in Calgary on Friday evening and Edmonton on Saturday. The score in Calgary was 6-3, and the one in Edmonton, 2-1. Meanwhile, the Detroit Red Wings were playing...
The Kings got some help without even asking for it in the form of Boston beating Calgary Monday night. Wait. That was to be the headline, and when I headed upstairs to the Staples Center pressbox, the Bruins seemed to have the Flames well in hand, up 3-0 with little...
Corey Perry recorded ten shots, the Ducks lost two key players, and Alex Ovechkin romped over them. That’s pretty much the story from Anaheim on Sunday night. Here’s what’s significant about each of those. First, Perry. His linemates, who right now are Getzlaf and...
Jeff Carter put it simply on Thursday night, explaining how his team won their game versus Calgary: “It’s simple hockey, really. It starts below the puck, and you don’t cheat on defense to get offense.” That system seems like it demands speed, because if you’re back...
Efficiency. Expending only the amount of effort one needs to to get the job done. That’s great if you’re talking about your home AC unit or (if you’re not a car guy) your chariot. But if you’re a hockey team, and what you do is observed by some number of tens of...
The LA Kings were going to exit Wednesday out of the playoffs no matter what they managed to do against the Chicago Blackhawks. They entered the night at 52 points, three behind Calgary for the West’s last wildcard spot. Their one advantage was a game in hand on the...
Rob Blake joined Rogie Vachon, Dave Taylor, Marcel Dionne, Luc Robitaille, and Wayne Gretzky amongst the rafters at Staples Center on Saturday night. The guys hang out up there most of the time, watching today’s players trying to duplicate their feats of hockey...
What year is this? Lou Lamoriello is standing behind the New Jersey bench coaching a team that is playing Scott Gomez against Ilya Bryzgalov in net—for the Anaheim Ducks. If you said 2006, you’d be right. And wrong. Because that was the oddity of the game featuring...
Regular readers of NHL media information probably know more than they need to about the Eastern Conference teams. Why is that? Because despite the fact that the Stanley Cup has been won by the West in six of the last ten years and four of the last five, the media is...
