ANAHEIM –– Lukas Dostal made 52 saves and stopped Jack Hughes’ penalty shot attempt with 2.1 seconds to play, as the Ducks held on for a 4-3 victory over the New Jersey Devils on Friday night at Honda Center.
Frank Vatrano scored two goals and Adam Henrique added his 18th goal of the season for the Ducks, but Vatrano also handed a dramatic penalty shot to New Jersey by deliberately knocking the net off its moorings following a scramble around Dostal.
Hughes had a goal and two assists for New Jersey, but he botched the penalty shot by turning over the puck during his tentative approach to Dostal.
Dostal’s stellar performance – his second 50-save performance of the season – gave the Ducks consecutive victories for just the third time since Nov. 15 and the second time in the 2024 calendar year.
What was decidedly less novel was that the result of the game wasn’t supported analytically – the Ducks have made a routine of both winning and losing games when the numbers say they shouldn’t – and that they lost even more bodies to injury.
On the same Thursday that they traded Ilya Lyubushkin, they lost their longest-tenured player, defenseman Cam Fowler, to a facial laceration, and their most promising young forward, Leo Carlsson, to an upper-body injury. Neither played Friday and both were deemed day-to-day. Troy Terry did return to the lineup after a two-game absence, but Mason McTavish exited the game in the first period and did not return. They have been without last year’s leading scorer, Trevor Zegras, since Jan. 9.
In addition to Vatrano and Henrique, Max Jones notched a goal and an assist. Radko Gudas had an assist and a fight to answer for the booming hip check he delivered to Hughes.
Hughes scored a goal and assisted on Timo Meier’s tally as well as Tyler Toffoli’s. Toffoli added an assist while rookie Luke Hughes, Jack’s brother, contributed two helpers. Nico Daws stopped just 10 of 14 shots before being relieved by Akira Schmid.
Dostál shined early and often, making acrobatic saves and often in succession, such as when he stopped Erik Haula’s slap shot and then three rapid-fire follow-ups from Curtis Lazar early in the third period.
New Jersey would score the only goal of the closing act, a rebound marker by Toffoli for the Devils’ second power-play conversion of the evening.
The second period again saw the Ducks emerge with a pair of goals to the Devils’ one, despite the Devils owning advantages in every major possession category, albeit with lower-quality opportunities than in the opening 20 minutes.
Jones extended the Ducks’ lead to 3-1 with 6:13 left in the period, first with persistent puck protection to initiate a cycle and then, after a D-to-D pass, his redirection of Gustav Lindström’s shot from the right point for Jones’s fifth goal of the campaign.
New Jersey clawed back a goal on the power play with a dish along the blue line of its own. The brothers Hughes connected as Luke moved the puck to Jack, who glided into the left faceoff dot and fired the puck through a Toffoli screen on the power play with 4:33 to play in the period.
The Ducks pushed their second-intermission lead to two as with 2:52 left Vatrano scored his team-leading 29th goal of the season and his second of the night. His interception in the defensive zone ignited a counterattack that included two cross-ice passes from Gudas and Terry. Terry’s found a hard-driving Vatrano in space, setting up his forehand-to-backhand score.
Even more so than the second stanza, the first period was carried analytically by New Jersey, which accumulated some 82% of the expected goals per Natural Stat Trick, but won on the scoreboard by the Ducks.
Dostál stopped 18 of 19 shots in the frame, including four on the power play and six of seven high-danger chances. He was anchored to a tenuous 1-0 lead 3:37 into the match after McTavish won a puck battle in the corner and, as he fell to the ice, slid the puck to a wide-open Vatrano, who went five hole for a goal from the doorstep to open the scoring.
Meier scored New Jersey’s lone goal after he went to work on the forecheck to initiate the scoring sequence and finished it only after Dostál had stoned Toffoli’s efforts from point-blank range. Meier, who scored with 2:36 left in the period, was also the first victim of Dostál’s larcenous 20 minutes, which also saw him rob both Hughes brothers, Nico Hischier, Erik Haula and also Chris Tierney on a breakaway.
The Ducks got a goal back 51 seconds later from a similar effort by Henrique, who separated the puck low in the Devils’ zone on the forecheck before receiving it back from Jones for a wraparound goal. Henrique has compiled 23 points in his last 22 games and six points in his past four outings, including goal No. 18 of 2023-24.
More to come on this story.
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