Anaheim 5, Detroit 3
After being blown out at home, 5-0 in the first home game of this series, and being without their workhorse defenseman Chris Pronger, and an injured Chris Kunitz, the Anaheim Ducks new they would need someone to step up and play some quality minutes, someone to play some strong defense and someone to score some goals. They got a little of all of those from one guy.
Ric Jackman, playing defense and helping to fill in for Pronger, scored the second goal for the ducks, scoring on the first shot of his NHL playoff debut. Teemu Selanne snapped out of his scoring slump with a goal and two assists, and Ryan Getzlaf scored the go-ahead goal Thursday night to help the Ducks beat the Red Wings 5-3 in Game 4.
“We were dominating, but the bounces didn’t go our way,” said Dominik Hasek who faced just 22 shots overall. “They scored on their first shot and they scored on their first power play. To play without Pronger, I believe, was a great motivation for them, and we didn’t use that advantage — unfortunately.”
Corey Perry jumped on a turnover by Detroit’s Todd Bertuzzi and beat goalie Hasek with a slap shot to start the game just 1:37 in. Less than two minutes later, Daniel Cleary tied the game. Jackman, inserted into the point on the powerplay, scored at 11:46 and Selanne then broke a four-game goal drought at 18:31 of the first period to give the Ducks a 3-1 lead on only eight shots. The last time Hasek gave up as many as three goals in one period of a playoff game was in 1999
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The second period belonged to the Wings. They continued to hurt Anaheim on the power play, as they took full of advantage of the hole in the Ducks’ penalty kill. Bertuzzi scored while camped outside the crease and Cleary banged in his second of the night to erase the deficit. It appeared that Ducks were about to hurt themselves again when Rob Niedermayer took a cross-checking penalty on the opening faceoff of the third with Perry already in the box. But they managed to escape harm as they limited Detroit to one shot. “That was a dumb penalty by me,” Niedermayer said. “It was a long two minutes in the box. Jiggy was fantastic. It was big kill for us.”
“To me, we had our opportunity,” Detroit coach Mike Babcock said. “It was one of those games. We did a lot of good things, but we shot ourselves in the foot a little bit.”
Getzlaf broke a 3-3 tie on a reawakened power play in the third period and Rob Niedermayer finished the win off with an empty-net goal. Jean-Sebastien Giguere came up big during two five-on-three disadvantages as he survived a 39-shot onslaught by the Red Wings.
“We worked so hard at getting that win in Detroit and then you come here and for some reason that nobody knows, you come out flat with no energy in front of our fans,” Giguere said. “It was all just disappointing, but I don’t think we were down. “We were just disappointed in ourselves and we knew we could come back and do well.”
With the series shifting back to Detroit, tied at two games, and with Pronger coming back, the future looks a little bit brighter for the Anaheim Ducks.
