Ducks dig deep without top three scorers, beat Stars to snap 9-game winless streak

ANAHEIM, Calif. – All it took for the Anaheim Ducks to snap out of a nine-game winless streak was to lose its top-three scorers before game time against the No. 2 team in the NHL. Just how they drew it up, right?

Without the services of Leo Carlsson, Troy Terry and Cutter Gauthier, the Ducks buckled down for their most complete 60-minute checking effort in a 3-1 win over the visiting Dallas Stars on Tuesday at Honda Center.

Anaheim earned its first win since Dec. 20 and just its third win in the last 16 games (3-11-12). The Ducks nine-game winless streak was tied for fourth-longest in team history with five consecutive regulation losses.

“Unbelievable,” Ducks goalie Lukáš Dostál said of his team’s effort. “You guys could see that when we played the right way we're getting the results, and the guys, it was a long time coming for us, and hopefully, the dark times are over, and we can just build on it.”

Chris Kreider scored his second goal in five games and 15th of the season following a month-long goal drought, and Beckett Sennecke grinded out the game-winning goal on his knees in the crease for the rookie’s 15th tally of the season. Jacob Trouba hit the empty net, and Dostál made 24 saves in 58 minutes of near-shutout hockey.

“So, you see that those guys (Carlsson, Terry, Gauthier) aren’t in the line-up, you gotta give an extra 10% out there,” Sennecke said, and I think everyone did.”

Anaheim (22-21-3, 47 points) remains just outside the playoff field after their recent skid–two points behind final wild card San Jose (23-19-3, 49 points) and three points behind Seattle (21-15-8, 50 points) for third place in the Pacific Division.

It’s an opportune time for the Ducks to break out of their winless streak, with a back-to-back home-and-home against the Los Angeles Kings (19-16-10, 48 points) next on the docket on Friday and Saturday and eight of their next 10 games against the Pacific Division heading into the Olympic break.

“We're fighting for the same airspace right now,” Ducks coach Joel Quenneville said of the Kings. “I'm sure every shift’s gonna be important, gonna be enthusiastic in a crowd, but the timing is that we needed a win.”

“I think the way we come out of it tonight, we should build off of this, and knowing that that's the right way to play.”

Hard Work Beats Talent

While the underlying mentality of Tuesday’s effort has tried to be instilled all season by Quenneville and his staff, the circumstances that dictated its necessity did not become evident until late in the day, as Carlsson, Terry and Gauthier were deemed “game-time decisions” with injuries and illness (more on that below).

It was probably going to take an effort like this to snap a nine-game winless streak that threatened to spiral further, and so, for Quenneville, it was a bit of Column A and a bit of Column B to get this kind of focus from his group.

“You're missing your three top guys, scoring-wise, and we had to win a game, one-nothing, two-one, whatever it was, three-one,” Quenneville said. “At the same time, we got to be committed to play that way, going forward, because, I mean, the league is different than when we started, and we had a lot of success scoring goals. But you got to play a hard, 60-minute game, and a priority is the check, and off of that, you can score goals.”

The Ducks had talked in the days and hours leading up to the win about simplifying their game, getting pucks in deep and getting to work, and that’s what Anaheim did offensively.

“We knew they were coming in on back-to-back,” Sennecke said of Dallas, who played the Kings Monday night, “so we wanted to kind of get pucks behind them, and forecheck hard, and make their kind of D's life tough back there. I think we did that really well, and they turned the pucks over again, then back to us, and we were generating offense off it.”

That was one way to limit the attack of the Stars, the No. 2 goal-scoring team in the NHL.

But the Stars threat of goal-scoring talent–as they evidenced in an 8-3 drubbing of the Ducks in their last trip to Honda Center in December–sparked a renewed attention to detail in Anaheim’s defensive corps.

The Ducks had been burned repeatedly in the winless streak by turnovers in the neutral-zone turnovers, defensive miscommunications and odd-man rushes–singular events that would undo the progress Quenneville mentioned.

To a man, each Ducks forward and defenseman interviewed in the last two days spoke about the that specifically needed focus, and the result was a lock-down effort that earned the entire defensive unit–all seven defensemen–the team’s victory item of the Mighty Ducks films Coach Gordon Bombay jacket.

“We didn't try to make plays in the neutral zone,” Dostál said, “and that's, basically, (how) we were trying to approach the previous games, but we couldn't do it, but tonight we could finally do it. Dallas, they live out of rushes, and I don't think they didn't have a rusher, or even when they tried to make a pass out of rush, we're always back in the middle, and the guys just did the hell of a job tonight.”

No matter who is in the line-up, these are the tenets Anaheim wants to take forward.

Granlund Greatness

With the emergency need for roster adjustments, it was Finnish Olympic selection Mikael Granlund that slid into Swedish Olympic selection Leo Carlsson’s top-six center role between Alex Killorn and Sennecke.

While Granlund recorded just one assist on the night, it was his most thorough and impactful outing as a Duck. (Yes, even more so than his franchise record-tying five-point night in Boston back in October.)

“He was great. Phenomenal stick tonight,” Sennecke said. “He was turning over lots of pucks in the forecheck… He had poise with the puck. He was finding me and Killer out there when we were playing together, and it's awesome.”

Granlund led all forwards with over 19 minutes of ice time, won 11-of-19 face-offs (including 3-for-3 in the offensive zone and 3-for-4 in the defensive zone) and was on the ice for all four goals scored both ways.

With Granlund on the ice at five-on-five, the Ducks earned 77% of the expected goals and nearly 76% of the shot attempts.

We knew going into the (season), when we acquired them, that he's–I don’t know if he's under the radar, but we think he's a really good player,” Quenneville said. “You can use him in a multi-faceted way, where he's one guy, no matter if you get looking for production, you're looking for safety, and a checker, he provides that.”

Top Trio Triaged

As mentioned, it was late notice that Anaheim would be without its top three scorers for Tuesday night.

Leo Carlsson (44 points), Troy Terry (42 points, assists leader with 29) and Cutter Gauthier (40 points, goals leader with 20) were all full participants in the morning skate, but none were able to suit up by game time.

After the game, Quenneville labelled all three as “day-to-day.” Anaheim has the day off Wednesday before returning to practice on Thursday.

Carlsson was out with a lower-body injury for the second time in a month. Carlsson first sat out with the injury on Dec. 22, and at that time, it was deemed as a precautionary and short-term move, and he returned immediately after the Christmas break.

However, even as Carlsson broke a 12-game goal drought on Saturday in Buffalo, it seemed like something had still been nagging the Swedish Olympic forward through that stretch.

At practice on Monday, Carlsson left the ice about five minutes into the session and did not return. Then on Tuesday morning, Carlsson was back to his top-six center spot and even spoke with reporters afterward.

Carlsson did not skate in warm-ups at Honda Center and was ruled out for the game.

Terry had missed the previous two games with an upper-body injury and had been termed day-to-day with the injury. Terry slotted in on the fourth line at Tuesday’s morning skate, and the unusual placement noted the possibility of missing a third straight game.

Quenneville labelled the veteran as a game-time decision on Tuesday morning, and Terry did not skate in warm-ups.

For Gauthier, this game marked an NHL first for the 21-year-old, as an illness took him out for the first time in his short career. Gauthier played the final game of the 2023-24 season after finishing up at Boston College and then suited up for all 82 games of his 20-goal rookie season.

Gauthier had been one of just five Ducks to play in all 45 games leading into Tuesday. His absence left Alex Killorn, Mason McTavish, Beckett Sennecke and Jackson LaCombe as the only Ducks to play in every game so far this season.