ANAHEIM — Fire at their heads. The rest of them will follow.
Nick Ritchie was cruising down left wing Sunday afternoon and suddenly had a puck bounce primly off the wall and into his nitro zone.
There was nothing between Ritchie and Nashville goaltender Pekka Rinne. There was also no time for playoff bromides to ring in Ritchie’s ears, like “There are no pretty goals in the playoffs.” Prettiness depends on the eye on the beholder, and the blinking eyes behind the mask.
Ritchie let it go, right at Rinne’s head, and it wound up in the top right corner of the net. That put the Ducks ahead 4-3, and they eventually won Game 2 of the Western Conference finals, 5-3. It was the second time in five nights that Ritchie had gotten the BLT goal, the one that Broke the Last Tie. The previous one was in Game 7 against Edmonton, and it was the same hollow-point fastball that isn’t supposed to get past today’s goaltenders.
Brandon Montour led the way down the right side and shoved the puck to Ryan Getzlaf, whose tipped pass led Ritchie, and created the space.
“He (Rinne) is a butterfly goaltender so you just try to shoot it high,” Ritchie said. “It ended up in the right spot.”
Rinne was a steel curtain as the Predators ran roughshod over Chicago and St. Louis in the first two rounds. His save percentage for the playoffs was .950 in Nashville’s first 11 games.
But on Friday Jakob Silfverberg and Hampus Lindholm struck from distance, and in Game 2 Sami Vatanen put the Ducks on the board with a power-play goal, their first in 21 tries, and Ritchie took off the driver and scored as well.
All those bombs generally were so well-placed that it’s hard to question Rinne. But at the very least the Ducks have shaken off the spell that he imposed during last year’s first round.
“I just closed my eyes and shot it as hard as I could,” Vatanen said, vouching for the wisdom of simple fans.
Nashville coach Peter Laviolette thought Vatanen’s goal was the proximate cause of the loss. Rarely is there such a bold line of demarcation, but the Ducks did nothing right before Matt Irwin took that tripping penalty on Ondrej Kase. They did very little wrong afterward.
Oh, there was the curious backwards pass that Silfverberg tried to send toward Getzlaf, which became a runaway for Nashville and a goal by Filip Forsberg that made it 3-2. But then Shea Theodore, another one of the young Ducks who sees shooting daylight in a coal mine, put a puck on Rinne, and Kase cashed in the rebound for a 3-3 tie.
And there was a scramble in front of John Gibson that required levees, bomb shelters and blocked shots by Ryan Kesler and Josh Manson. The Predators didn’t score there, and couldn’t coax another puck past Gibson even though they won a string of faceoffs in the third period, and kept forcing icing as the Ducks gasped and the clock remained strangely still.
But when the last-minute draw arrived, Kesler beat Ryan Johansen and got the puck to Getzlaf, who found Antoine Vermette for the empty-netter.
“We’ve got a pretty calm group,” Vatanen said, not speaking for the paying customers.
Getzlaf has become the common thread for all of this. For years he was joined to Corey Perry’s hip. He turned 32 on Wednesday, Perry turns 32 today.
That changed this season. Then Patrick Eaves came over and, with his finishing ability, lit a match to Getzlaf’s line. Then Eaves got hurt in the Edmonton series. Perry rejoined Getzlaf, sometimes with Rickard Rakell. On Sunday Getzlaf played with Kase and Ritchie, neither of whom had participated in an NHL playoff game until this season.
“Getzie’s a world-class player,” Coach Randy Carlyle said. “There might be times when we overuse him, but when you have that option you’re going to take advantage of it.”
In this game Getzlaf had three assists and was plus-2. In 13 playoff games he has 18 points and is plus-10.
Top centers make the game easier for others. For the real top centers, it doesn’t matter who the others are.
“There’s a few minor adjustments that you make when you play with different guys,” Getzlaf said. “I know when these kids come up, they’re going to go hard, so I’ve got to get them the puck down low. But in the end it’s just hockey. They’re here for a reason. I just have to work off them, the best I can.”
Next stop is Nashville, for Game 3 Tuesday. Fire when ready, because they might not be.