The Anaheim Ducks have been up and down on the power play all season long but on Friday night, they were up.
Way up.
The Ducks scored four times on the man advantage in Game 5 -- after going 0-for-11 in the previous three games -- cruising to a 6-2 victory over Dallas while taking a 3-2 series lead in the process.
Dallas has been teetering on the fine line between intensity and poor discipline throughout the series, and the latter was its undoing tonight. The Stars made several decisions that left them shorthanded, beginning when their resident agitators -- Antoine Roussel and Ryan Garbutt -- took first-period penalties that led directly to Anaheim goals.
Roussel was called for interfering with Frederik Andersen four minutes in, and Nick Bonino capitalized shortly thereafter for his first goal of the series. Then, at the nine minute mark, Garbutt took a five-minute spearing major on Corey Perry and was tossed from the game -- on the ensuing power play, Rickard Rakell scored his first-ever NHL goal on assists from Francois Beauchemin and Luca Sbisa.
In the second period, there was more of the same -- Dallas lacking discipline, and the Ducks taking advantage.
Mathieu Perreault scored his second of the playoffs on the PP, awarded to Anaheim after Alex Goligoski was called for (another) goalie interference penalty late in the opening frame. Dallas cut the lead to 3-2 when Shawn Horcoff scored midway through the period, but the Ducks blew the game wide open early in the third when Jakob Silfverberg and Ryan Getzlaf scored in the opening five minutes, before Corey Perry scored -- what else? -- a power-play goal at the 6:49 mark.
All told, Getzlaf and Perry combined for six points on the night while Dallas’ dynamic duo of Jamie Benn and Tyler Seguin went for just one. While that’s too simple a narrative to describe the entire series, a trend has developed where the team that gets the better performance from its star duo tends to have the greater amount of overall success.
Looking ahead, it’ll be interesting to see how the Stars regroup and prepare for Sunday’s elimination game in Dallas. The team was great in its first two games at American Airlines, but are now coming off their biggest blowout loss of the series and will have questions about Kari Lehtonen, who was hooked tonight for the first time in this series.