ANAHEIM –– The Ducks mounted three different leads in regulation and finished off a 4-3 victory over the Ottawa Senators in a shootout at Honda Center Sunday.
Frank Vatrano scored two goals and assisted on a third by Jackson LaCombe. Troy Terry helped set up all three tallies 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 on a conversion that sealed the victory.
Overtime featured frenetic action, punctuated by Zegras’ breakaway, which led to scoring chances for Terry and Pavel Mintyukov, but no one found the net in OT.
The final 20 minutes began tied and remained that way for 69 seconds as both teams exchanged goals between the 4:37 and 5:46 marks of the third period, ultimately sending the match to a bonus session.
Ottawa tied the game at 3 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, after a faceoff win, 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.
The Senators scored the second period’s lone goal despite the Ducks out-shooting and out-chancing them, as they did in the first. The hosts also had stronger quality chances, 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 came to Thomas Chabot, who feathered a slow lead pass for Tkachuk, who still had enough time on his breakaway to be stopped on the initial effort and then sweep home his rebound. The Sens’ captain has 12 goals this season and eight points across his five-game scoring streak.
In the first period, the two sides exchanged power-play goals before the Ducks beat the buzzer to reclaim the lead 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 set up a play where Vatrano set Terry up for 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 was his third goal of the season, and though he is a defenseman they have all been close-range tallies off activations.
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Ottawa had knotted the game off a power-play goal that disrupted the Ducks’ seven-for-seven penalty-kill streak in their past three home games. 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 hit from Jansen Harkins.
The Ducks drew the game’s first penalty and converted on their first power play, 14:45 into the match. After their first foray into the offensive zone fizzled, their second entry crescendoed into Ryan Strome’s pass from the goal line to the high slot for Vatrano, who tucked a shot under the bar to get the scoring rolling.