LOS ANGELES — Saturday night was fevered.
Jonathan Quick played on a sub-Olympian level. Corey Perry somehow wheeled around to fire a puck from his own right circle to the faraway empty net.
Those are extenuating circumstances, ones that can’t escape a team hungering for points and position. The Ducks won, 4-2, then wasted no time beating it out of downtown L.A., lest someone throw a challenge flag to restore normalcy.
“When you hold a team like that to 25 shots on goal in your own building, that doesn’t happen very often,’ said Cam Fowler.
“It’s always a collective effort against those guys.”
And yet the Ducks staggered through a potentially ruinous third period.
After they grabbed a 3-0 lead on Ondrej Kase’s second goal, they watched Nick Shore score from the slot on a nice pass from Christian Folin.
Then rookie Alex Iafallo never quit fighting for the puck until he had removed it from Kevin Bieksa behind the net. He fed it to Derek Forbort, whose shot glanced off Ryan Getzlaf’s skae and onto the stick of Anze Kopitar, who buried it for a 3-2 game with 6:14 left.
The Ducks got an immediate power play but couldn’t convert and John Gibson had to hunker down in the final minutes. Then Perry launched a spinning bomb that might be hard to duplicate with no one else around him,. It was good enough to claim victory at Staples Center and give the Ducks a 15-4-4 record against the Kings in their past 23 regular-season games.
It also took a superlative effort from defensemen Fowler, Josh Manson and Hampus Lindholm, all of whom topped 20 minutes and defused the Kings’ top weapons until Kopitar’s goal. Tyler Toffoli and Tanner Pearson were rendered invisible, and the rebounds that John Gibson did give up were taken into custody.
“We’ve done a lot better job staying together, coming out of our zone,” Getzlaf said. “It comes with support, and with the defensemen talking.”
The Kings appeared to cut the lead to 2-1 in the second period, but replay showed that Iafallo shoved the puck past Gibson with his glove. The Ducks also found themselves on the penalty-kill only twice, with an interference by Andrew Cogliano on Adrian Kempe and a late slash by Ryan Kesler.
“We’ve been doing a better job lately” Fowler said. “A lot of it comes from breaking out of our end a lot cleaner. Against a strong forecheck like they have, that’s what you need in a game like this.
“It was pointed out recently that we’d gotten a little sloppy with that, and it’s so clear in our play when it goes by the wayside, when we’re just slapping pucks around and we’re not clean. When we do it properly it gives us a lot more confidence. And we did a much better job in the second period, which had been an Achilles’ heel for us.”
Fowler has been dealing with Kopitar and Dustin Brown for seven years now. Secrets don’t exist. Refinements do.
“The thing about Kopitar is that he’s so strong,” Fowler said. ‘The way he’s able to protect the puck, I try not to engage with him too much. I just try to beat him to the next spot. If I start jostling with him too much it’s going to be a bad idea for me. When you play guys like that you just try to take away time and space, which is what you always hear but it’s true.”
A Kings-Ducks game always has its own script. This one began with three fights in a four-second span. “That’s good hockey right there,” Getzlaf said, smiling.
That was pretty much expected. What happened after the Ducks emerged from a penalty kill was not. Kase went on a 1-man foray against the Kings’ defense, got around Folin, and shot more or less innocently at Quick. Then the light went on,, and you didn’t know if was a real fire alarm or if Quick just whiffed it.
“I’ve been playing against Quickie for a long time,” Fowler said. “You don’t see that very often so it gave us a bit of a boost.”
Then Drew Doughty went to the box for a chronically borderline interference call on Rickard Rakell, who had just passed the puck. Doughty growled his way off the ice, and Ryan Kesler quickly made it 2-0.
Kase capped his first-ever 3-point night in the third period when Quick was fiddling with the puck behind his net. He never sensed Nick Ritchie coming from behind, and when Ritchie took away the puck Quick stepped away from the net to poke at it. Kase materialized to take Ritchie’s pass and scored on a net that was almost as empty as the one Perry would exploit later.
To Randy Carlyle it was an effort that needed to be duplicated, not celebrated.
“We have to play like that for 60 minutes, not just 45,” the Ducks’ coach said. “We stopped skating in the third period and we started watching.”
Beforehand, both teams watched as 44-year play-by-play man Bob Miller was honored. A banner with his name and a microphone went to the rafters, and a statue of Miller was unwrapped outside Staples.
“And the thing is, I knew him when he was a rookie,” Carlyle said.
“He always told me that a sharp pencil was better than a long memory,” said Jim Fox, Miler’s broadcast partner. The Ducks and Kings were interested in neither, except maybe an eraser for Quick.
