Marchant is held out of Game 5

On Thursday, Ducks center Todd Marchant proclaimed himself ready to play in Game 5 against the Vancouver Canucks, despite being out for nearly a month after sports hernia surgery.

But the final decision belonged to Coach Randy Carlyle, who was cautious.

“Marchant is very, very close,” Carlyle said after the morning skate. “He’s a game-time decision.”

And the answer was, not yet.

If he were to come back, which could happen soon, Marchant likely would be asked to center the fourth line. But the 33-year-old veteran hasn’t played since March 31 against St. Louis and had the surgery on April 6 at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

Although he wasn’t expected to be available for at least another few weeks, Marchant is clearly healing faster than expected.

It has been a difficult season for him. Persistent groin and abdominal injuries limited him to 56 games, which included two stints on injured reserve.

“It seems like every time you feel healthy and ready to go, you hurt something else,” he said. “It’s all the result of one injury that never healed. The only thing that was going to fix that was having surgery.

“Like I said, I wish I would have known back in December. I could have had it done. But unfortunately we didn’t and it took time for us to figure it out.”

A veteran of 59 postseason games, Marchant said not only did the surgery succeed but he also hasn’t had any setbacks in this latest rehabilitation, unlike earlier in the year when he tried to come back too soon.

“The doctors told me you’re going to be swollen and you’re going to be black and blue for at least two weeks,” he said. “I didn’t have any of that. I kept saying, ‘When is it coming, when is it coming?’ It never did. As a result, we were able to start the rehab a lot quicker.”

Carlyle admits that he needles players when they’re injured.

“As always, coaches like to put a lot of pressure on injured players and he’s no different,” he said. “It’s in jest. You’re always trying to get a guy back. Ultimately it’s his health. And it’s his decision.”

 *

The cuts, bruises and lumps on the face of the Ducks’ Teemu Selanne has been well documented but there’s still a mystery about how he took a puck off the head in the first round against Minnesota during warmups at the Honda Center.

Selanne was skating away from the Ducks’ net near the center of the ice when he was struck on the right side of the face by a puck.

“That’s the one that has everyone scratching their head,” Carlyle said about his facially beat-up winger. “Where he got hit and the position where he was on the ice, it’s like it had to come from the other end.”

Selanne would not say that he believed that a Minnesota player aimed a puck at him, but he did wonder.

“Nobody saw it, so what can you do now?” Selanne said before the Ducks played Game 5 against Vancouver on Thursday. He doesn’t think it was a teammate because “there were few guys on that side. It happened so quickly. But it did happen like two minutes after everyone met up.”

Selanne was referring to a pregame scuffle between the teams that began with the Ducks’ George Parros and Wild enforcer Derek Boogaard throwing punches at each other.

“It’s a crime scene investigation,” Carlyle chuckled. ”

 *

After losing Games 3 and 4 at home, Vancouver welcomed a chance to continue its season Thursday night at Honda Center.

“We’re not making any huge changes, just some things to polish our game,” checking forward Alex Burrows said after the Canucks’ morning skate. “We just have to be smarter, especially in our defensive zone. We have to be able to block shots and get into the shooting lanes, plus we have to make sure that we’re clearing rebounds for Roberto [Luongo].”

The Canucks feel as if they haven’t helped Luongo with enough “dirty goals” like the Ducks have scored against them in the series.

“We have to take a page from their book,” Burrows said. “In playoff hockey, the games are so tight. In the games in our building, the Ducks did a really good job of going to the net hard and creating traffic and scoring rebound goals. That’s something that we have to do too. Those tic-tac-toe plays you don’t see as much in the playoffs.”

 *

 eric.stephens@latimes.com

 lonnie.white@latimes.com