New York: The Anaheim Ducks clinched a much-needed 3-2 victory over the Los Angeles Kings in Game Three of their Western Conference semi-final series on Thursday.
After dropping the first two games at home in their best-of-seven series, Anaheim coach Bruce Boudreau made some changes which paid off as the Ducks cut the Kings’ series lead to 2-1.
The biggest change was inserting goaltender Fredrick Anderson in place of Jonas Hiller, who played well but lost the first two games of the series.
Anderson was strong before leaving late in the third period with an injury.
Anaheim opened the scoring on a power play early in the first period, Corey Perry grabbing his third goal of the postseason.
The Ducks got another power-play goal in the second when Nick Bonino set up Teemu Selanne.
“Since Game 6 against Dallas, he seems like he’s found the fountain of youth. I hope that keeps going,” Boudreau said.
“The reason Teemu has almost 700 goals is because he goes to the net and he stops.” Not surprisingly, Kings coach Darryl Sutter had a different take on the play.
“We needed to make a better play there,” he said.
Kings defenseman Drew Doughty was on the wrong end of things late in the third period.
As he tried to make too many moves with the puck Anaheim pinched it to launch a break and defenseman Ben Lovejoy scored to make it 3-1.
“It plants a seed of doubt in their minds, and that’s what we wanted to do,” Lovejoy said.
The Kings got on the board in the second period through Jeff Carer and made it 3-2 on Mike Richards’ goal with 30 seconds left but they had little time to find the equaliser.
