Put two elite goaltenders at opposite ends of the ice, playing for teams that last season were among the toughest to score against, and what do you get?
A 7-6 shootout victory by the Canucks over the Ducks, a result determined in the 13th round of the tiebreaker when Vancouver defenseman Mattias Ohlund snapped a shot over the shoulder of backup goalie Jonas Hiller, who had relieved Jean-Sebastien Giguere in the second period.
"I don't want to think about what went wrong. There was too much stuff," Ducks defenseman Francois Beauchemin said, a grimace expressing his distaste.
Kyle Wellwood scored in the first round of the shootout and Ryan Getzlaf in the second, the only scorers until Ohlund deflated the announced crowd of 16,704 Friday at the Honda Center. Ducks Coach Randy Carlyle was surprisingly calm afterward.
"Every game is not a Mona Lisa that you try to paint," he said.
Maybe. But paint-by-numbers defense doesn't work so well unless you like poker-playing dogs on black velvet.
The Ducks (6-5-1) and Canucks took turns making mistakes as ugly as some of the ghoulish costumes worn by fans in the Halloween night crowd.
The teams scored at even strength, while short-handed, on the power play and after the Ducks pulled Hiller for an extra skater. Corey Perry did the honors in that last category, scoring against Roberto Luongo with 56.9 seconds left in the third period, after Teemu Selanne took a hard hit and got a cut-up mouth as a reward for setting the play in motion with a pass off the end boards to Chris Kunitz.
"It was a weird game," Hiller said. "It seemed like every puck went in somehow."
The Ducks scored three times with the man advantage and the Canucks scored twice, including Steve Bernier's go-ahead goal at 8:34 of the third period.
The Ducks made history major and minor.
Selanne scored two goals to tie Guy Lafleur for 20th place on the career goal-scoring list at 560, and he has seven power-play goals in the last four games. He also had two assists, giving him seven goals and 10 points in his last five games.
Perry scored a personal-best five points (one goal and four assists). That performance, one game after Ryan Getzlaf recorded five assists against Detroit, gave the Ducks two players with five-point efforts in consecutive games for the first time in franchise history.
That was small consolation for Perry after the team's five-game winning streak ended.
