ANAHEIM — The Ducks mounted three different leads in regulation and finished off a 4-3 victory over the Ottawa Senators in a shootout on Sunday night at Honda Center.
Frank Vatrano scored two goals and assisted on a third by Jackson LaCombe. Troy Terry helped set up all three tallies – he has seven assists in his past four games – and scored the winning goal in the shootout. Lukáš Dostál compiled 29 saves.
Brady Tkachuk matched Vatrano’s goal total with two. Linus Ullmark came up with 32 stops.
No Sens scored in the shootout, but two Ducks did. Terry cashed in after opening up Ullmark to slide the puck through his five-hole before Trevor Zegras dazzled by shifting his skating speed and disguising his release during a conversion that sealed the victory.
Sunday’s often free-flowing action unfolded in contrast to matches against both these two teams’ prior opponents, the Kings, who beat the Ducks on Friday and Ottawa on Saturday.
“We’ve got the skill to play an open game. They’re a very good rush hockey team and they’re going to be up and down the ice,” Terry said. “We were managing the game a little differently than, say, when we were playing L.A. last game … as a young team, it’s just a matter of learning how to play in those skilled type of games.”
Overtime featured frenetic action, punctuated by Zegras’ breakaway, which led directly to scoring chances for Terry and Pavel Mintyukov.
The final 20 minutes began tied and remained that way for 69 seconds as the teams exchanged goals between the 4:37 and 5:46 marks of the third period.
Ottawa tied the score at 3-all when Cousins transported the puck across most of the ice before giving it up to Michael Amadio and driving to the net, where he got position on Mintyukov to tap Amadio’s pass through Dostál.
The Ducks took their third lead of the night when Terry’s pass through a sea of white jerseys found its intended target, Vatrano, in the slot. Vatrano’s second goal of the night also represented his sixth of the season and his fourth in four games after starting the season with 13 consecutive games without a goal against a goalie. Terry joked that Vatrano was once again “fun to be around,” now that he was scoring.
“It’s a huge relief. There were some games at the beginning of the season where I felt like I let my team down because I need to score goals to help our team,” Vatrano said. “When you lose some games by one goal, I feel it on myself.”
The Senators scored the second period’s lone goal despite the Ducks out-shooting and out-chancing them. The hosts also had stronger quality opportunities, most notably a point-blank try from Terry during a late-period power play.
A mere 37 seconds into the middle frame, Tkachuk scored his second goal of the night thanks to some Ducks discombobulation.
This time, Brian Dumoulin pinched just as his partner Drew Helleson was going for a line change and forward Isac Lundeström had the puck poked away in the Ottawa zone. It went to Thomas Chabot, who feathered a slow lead pass for Tkachuk, who still had enough time on his breakaway for a shot and a successful follow-up. The Sens’ captain has eight points across his five-game scoring streak.
Calamity also befell Dumoulin and the Ducks when the veteran pinched in a very similar position and an unfavorable bounce led to a pivotal breakaway goal by Jason Zucker in a 3-2 overtime loss to the Buffalo Sabres on Nov. 22.
“(Lundeström) was trying to make a spin-pass over to (Brett) Leason, who would have had a breakaway, and Dumoulin was up into the play while (Helleson) was changing,” Coach Greg Cronin said. “It was kind of like the goal we gave up on the breakaway (against Buffalo); it was a very eerily similar play.”
In the first period, the two sides swapped power-play goals before the Ducks beat the buzzer to reclaim the edge at intermission.
With only 5.7 seconds showing on the clock, the Ducks went up 2-1 off a clever rush and some persistence near the net.
LaCombe and Terry weaved through the neutral zone to create a play where Vatrano served Terry a redirection attempt. His rebound came to LaCombe, whose first backhand swipe hit the left pad of Ullmark but whose second found the net. It marked the second-year defenseman’s third goal of the season, and they have all been close-range tallies off activations.
“If defensemen are involved offensively, it’s a good sign for the team and that’s been a catalyst for our success,” Cronin said.
Ottawa had knotted the game off a power-play goal that disrupted the Ducks’ string of 15 straight penalty kills dating back to Nov. 18.
Down two men, they gave enough space to Ottawa’s leading scorer, Tim Stützle, to pick his spot for a shot that was nicked by Tkachuk en route to the nylon with 2:24 left in the frame. Stützle would later appear on the highlight reel twice more, when he was on the receiving end of a thunderous hip check by Ducks captain Radko Gudas and, later, another big hit from Jansen Harkins.
The Ducks drew the game’s first penalty and converted on their first power play, 14:45 into the match. Their foray into the offensive zone resulted in Ryan Strome’s pass from the goal line to the high slot for Vatrano, who tucked a shot under the bar for his first power-play goal of the campaign after scoring 13 last year.
Next up, the Ducks will host the Vegas Golden Knights on Wednesday night, seeking their first win in the third of four meetings against the 2023 Stanley Cup champions.
