Ducks rally again for league-leading 9th multi-goal comeback win

ANAHEIM, Calif. – Coming out of a “mini training camp” at the end of the Olympic break, the Anaheim Ducks have come out in this restart similarly to how they started the regular season: open, explosive and on fire.

The Ducks overcame a two-goal third-period deficit for the second consecutive game, and after the Winnipeg Jets leveled with the extra attacker, Beckett Sennecke dangled around a sliding Jets defender to feed Chris Kreider for the overtime-winner in a 5-4 victory at Honda Center on Friday.

Anaheim won its fourth in a row–all four games in the month of February before and after the Olympics–and seventh in a row at home in front of an 11th consecutive sellout home crowd. The Ducks are 11-2-0 in their last 13 games and second place in the Pacific Division.

“We had kind of a mini training camp there for a bit, so it's strange having almost two weeks off in the middle of the season,” Sennecke said, “but we got two wins in a row now, so we're starting on the right foot.”

The Ducks have done so with their second consecutive and league-leading ninth multi-goal comeback. Anaheim is just the sixth team in NHL history with nine or more mult-goal comeback wins in the first 58 games of a season and the first since the 2005-06 Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes.

“I think we just have that belief in ourselves that we were never out of it,” Sennecke said, “and I think that's kind of the biggest thing in these comeback wins is we never think we're out of it, and we know we can score goals.”

Sennecke racked up three primary assists to retake the rookie points lead. The 20-year-old leads all NHL rookies with 48 points, one more than Montreal’s Ivan Demidov, and 19 goals, one more than Matthew Schaefer of the New York Islanders.

Jacob Trouba got the Ducks on the board at the end of the second period, and goals by Leo Carlsson on the power play and Pavel Mintyukov on a rebound brought the Ducks level.

An incredible individual effort from Ryan Poehling put Anaheim ahead, but the Jets scored with the goalie pulled to force overtime, where Sennecke hit Chris Kreider for his 20th goal of the season and the win.

Lukas Dostal made 29 saves in the win, and U.S. Olympic gold medalist Connor Hellebuyck made 35 stops in the loss.

“It was a thrilling game,” Ducks coach Joel Quenneville said. “The crowd’s been great, and I'm sure there's a lot to be excited about in a game like tonight, but certainly, we find different ways, and the guys still compete, and it wasn't pretty at the start of that game.”

Anaheim (32-23-3, 67 points) jumped back over Edmonton (29-23-8, 66 points) for second place in the Pacific Division with two fewer games played than the Oilers. The Ducks are three points behind first-place Vegas (28-17-14, 70 points) with one game in hand.

There is finally a bit of distance from their divisional opponents with Seattle four points back (27-22-9, 63 points) in the second wild card and Los Angeles seven points back (23-21-14, 60 points). Utah (31-24-4, 66 points) holds the first wild card, but with the Ducks snugly in the Pacific’s top three, the Central Division Mammoth don’t factor in.

Anaheim continues this massive seven-game homestand against Calgary on Sunday. The Ducks won the first meeting of the season in Calgary in January with a thrilling overtime win on Sennecke’s first career hat trick.

Comeback Over Connor

By now, every American hockey fan is well aware of Winnipeg Jets goaltender Connor Hellebuyck, whose heroics in the Olympic men’s hockey gold medal game for the United States in Milan last Sunday were enough to earn a Presidential Medal of Freedom–the highest civilian honor in this country.

Through most of the first two periods, Hellebuyck did not need to be heroic; he merely needed to be average. Anaheim was admittedly slow and could not establish any sort of traffic in front of the American goaltender, as Winnipeg outworked the Ducks for a 2-0 lead.

Late in the second period, Anaheim finally won the puck in deep and put bodies between Hellebuyck and the blue line, where Jacob Trouba wristed a shot around an Ian Moore screen for the Ducks’ first goal of the game and Trouba’s 10th of the season.

“I just thought we had to get our legs going a little more,” American gold medalist Jackson LaCombe said. “A little slow in the first and second there, but we got going at the end of the second, and the third thought we did a great job just getting pucks behind, and then like I said, using our legs and our speed.”

LaCombe watched Hellebuyck up-close as his teammate in Milan, despite not seeing any ice time for the Americans. So, the Ducks defenseman was well aware that if he can see it, he can stop it.

Even when Winnipeg reestablished a two-goal lead, the Ducks kept it simple on an ensuing power play. Sennecke sent the puck through traffic off Hellebuyck’s pad, LaCombe flipped the rebound over the sprawling netminder, and Leo Carlsson tapped in the second goal for this 20th tally of the season

Just over three minutes later, Sennecke fired another shot off Hellebuyck’s pad with bodies in front, and Pavel Mintyukov was able to swoop in for the open-net rebound to tie the game, 3-3.

“He's one of the best goalies in the world, so, you're probably not gonna beat him clean,” Senecke said. “You just kind of want to create a rebound and get bodies at the net, and that's how we scored those two goals.”

Fast and Loose

Anaheim eventually completed the comeback with Ryan Poehling’s go-ahead goal and Chris Kreider’s overtime winner, but the necessary dramatics for the victory felt more like wide-open, early season Ducks hockey than the more tightened-down brand Anaheim established into the Olympic break.

“I think we're a little bit, the last couple of games, guilty of maybe being a little generous,” Joel Quenneville said. “Be it off the rush, or d-zone coverage has been loose. Our opponents have had some high quality opportunities.”

“I think we tightened that up from the way we started the year, and we were in a better spot coming into the break than in these two games, but we have ability to score goals and make plays, and we don't want to take that away from our team, just make that commitment of predictability in our own end and killing the rush game.”

Anaheim has played with fire plenty of times this season, and while the Ducks have found themselves on the positive end of things again, it was those lax defensive habits that kicked off the nine-game winless streak the Ducks had before this 11-2-0 run.

They’re cognizant of the highs and the lows at this point and know they have to be better in their own end to open games, after Edmonton scored 13 seconds in on Wednesday and Winnipeg scored 84 seconds into Friday’s game.

“We can score goals, and we have so many guys who can just put the puck in the net,” LaCombe said. “So it's obviously huge to have, but like I said, we just don't want to be relying on that every game. We gotta find a way to win games in different ways.”

Injured List

Anaheim went with an 11-forward, 7-defenseman line-up on Friday, as the forward corps struggles to maintain a fully healthy front.

Mikael Granlund missed his second straight game out of the Olympic break with an upper-body injury. Granlund took a hit from behind late in Finland’s bronze-medal match on Saturday in Milan. The hit sent Granlund to the locker room briefly before returning for post-game handshakes and the medal ceremony.

Granlund has yet to practice since returning to Anaheim.

“We're hoping that he can get on the ice tomorrow,” Quenneville said. “We're still not sure.”

Troy Terry joined Granlund with an upper-body injury of his own, the Ducks announced before taking on the Jets. Terry did not skate in the final five minutes against Edmonton on Wednesday and did not practice on Thursday.

Terry missed 11 games with an upper-body injury in January.

Frank Vatrano returned to Ducks practice on Thursday following personal leave to be with family after the death of his older brother. Vatrano suffered a fractured shoulder in late December, but he rejoined the team for the first Olympic break practices on Feb. 17.

Vatrano skated on the fourth line in Thursday’s practice but remained on injured reserve for Friday’s game.

“Frankie's close,” Quenneville said. “We'll probably have a better idea once he has a couple more practices with us.”

Ryan Strome was scratched for the fifth straight game, as the Ducks elected for the 11-7 line-up.

“He wasn't able to go today,” Quenneville said. “He was, we'll say, under the weather for today.”

The veteran has not played since Jan. 26 in Edmonton, when he played a season-low ice time for any Duck that was not ejected or injured (4:42).