Whicker: Flames’ absence is a present for Ducks

ANAHEIM >> He didn’t have time to wonder what was wrong with this picture. Kevin Bieksa got the puck and looked up and saw the landscape of Antarctica. Nothing but permafrost, as far as he could see.

Well, he did see Ryan Getzlaf, motoring toward the opposite blue line, but he didn’t see any opponents. No Calgary Flames. It was an odd time to hold a team meeting.

“We stopped playing,” Calgary coach Glen Gulutzan said. “We did that twice in this game.”

Bieksa fired the pass to Getzlaf at the Calgary blue line. Getzlaf was joined by Rickard Rakell as five Flames poured out of the bench to replace the truants. But they couldn’t get out there quickly enough to prevent a 3-on-zero.

Getzlaf’s rebound went off Brian Elliott and right to Rakell, who scored to tie the score in a game the visitors had been threatening to take over.

“That was a game-changer,” Gulutzan said, accurately, and the Ducks went on to win Game 1 of this first-round series, 3-2.

It wasn’t the whole game. Anaheim had back-to-back power plays later in the period and took a 3-2 lead on Jakob Silfverberg’s shot, after the Flames had been pinned in their own zone for 1:25.

And the Ducks had to survive a 3-on-5 and a 4-on-6 at the end, with goalie John Gibson stopping Calgary’s Johnny Gaudreau on a bid for overtime

But the Ducks were able to score a goal against air. In playoff games that have molecular margins of error, this was a gift that the Flames couldn’t give.

“I saw they were on a change, I saw Getzie was out there with speed, and all I wanted to do was give him a perfect pass,” Bieksa said. “That’s what happened. He didn’t have to wait for it.”

How in the name of Penn and Teller does a team just disappear?

The Flames changed all five players, and the line of Kris Versteeg, Alex Chiasson and Sam Bennett didn’t get off the ice before Bieksa saw the wide-open spaces. That’s where plus-minus can be fraudulent. Mikael Backlund, Matthew Tkachuk and Michael Frolik got a minus, and all they did was scramble onto the ice, which they couldn’t do until the laggards arrived.

“That’s playoff hockey,” Bieksa said. “There’s a lot of confusion going on. I don’t know if their D were caught out on a shift or what (to create the five-man change), but that’s what wins or loses playoff games. We’ve been on the wrong end of bad changes at times. It’s the type of thing that decides a game.”

The Flames had shaken off a bad first minute and took a 2-1 lead early in the second when Versteeg’s slick backhand pass was converted by Bennett. “They were keeping us bottled up,” Ducks coach Randy Carlyle said.

But the Ducks only needed a little twist of the cap to escape that bottle and get straightened out. Refusing to punish such mistakes is another way to avoid winning a playoff game.

“That’s something we talked about in detail the last couple of days because details like that are important,” Gulutzan said. “But I guess we thought it was icing on that play, and we hesitated coming to the bench, and it cost us.

“We stopped playing early in the game, too, on the too-many-men penalty when the puck hit their skate and it wasn’t called. That set us back, too.”

That happened in a frenzied opening minute. The Ducks were charging and the Flames employed the old Scott Niedermayer trick of shooting the puck at the bench area in hopes of hitting someone leaving the ice, which would be a too many men penalty. The puck did hit Hampus Lindholm but the infraction wasn’t called. Next thing you know, Dougie Hamilton of the Flames is called for tripping, and Getzlaf is beating Elliott on a shot from the right point, with Patrick Eaves buzzing the net.

Sean Monahan tied it on a power play goal after T.J. Brodie kept intercepting what Carlyle called “soft clears” by the Ducks. Then the Flames played very comfortably until they realized none of them was on the ice.

The Flames took too many penalties, thanks to “youthful exuberance” according to Gulutzan, but then the Ducks spent the final minutes in a minority. But Getzlaf, brilliant all game, kept clearing the puck, and he also had to win faceoffs with Ryan Kesler in the box.

“You need to win draws in that situation,” Gulutzan said.

The Ducks’ rookie defensemen, Brandon Montour and Shea Theodore, held up their end. Theodore played over 12 minutes, blocked three shots and had two assists, both on the power play.

“They were very solid,” Bieksa said. “I thought generally we were comfortable with the first period. I thought we might be overzealous, maybe run around and take some penalties, but I thought we were pretty poised most of the game, very mature. We don’t need anybody to play like Superman.”

But if the Ducks can recover the superpower it takes to vaporize a whole hockey team, they’ll take that.