By MIKE COOK (Associated Press)
ST. PAUL, Minn. — Troy Terry scored his second goal of the game with 8:20 left to break a tie and Ducks beat Minnesota 3-2 on Saturday night to end a 13-game losing streak against the Wild.
A few seconds after exiting the penalty box, Terry gathered a puck in the neutral zone. His shot from the left circle was blocked by Ryan Hartman, but Terry followed the rebound and beat Filip Gustavsson from the slot.
“It was funny, I was getting heckled in the penalty box a little bit, which is normal, just fans being funny, and it wasn’t too mean, but it was funny,” Terry said. “So I just came out of the box and saw that we had a turnover and it worked out.”
Ryan Strome tied it at 6:45 of the third, Adam Henrique had two assists and Lukas Dostal made 36 saves. The Ducks played their fifth game in eight days, and the final game of a stretch of eight of 10 on the road.
Kirill Kaprizov and Jon Merrill scored for Minnesota and Gustavsson stopped 22 shots. Minnesota has blown third period leads in back-to-back games after going 14-0-1 in its first 15 games leading after 40 minutes. Nashville scored three times in the final frame Thursday night in a 3-2 win.
Wild coach John Hynes said sloppiness and missed assignments cost his team in both games going into a 10-day break for its bye and the All-Star break.
“The guys gotta get some rest and they gotta reset. But I can tell you for sure when we get back that some of these attention to detail things without the puck are going to be addressed Day 1,” he said.
Strome tied it by outmuscling Brock Faber in front and redirecting a rising shot from Radko Gudas. Kaprizov slapped home a feed from Mats Zuccarello for an early Minnesota lead, but Terry countered for the Ducks less than two minutes later.
“I wish I had a really good answer for what we need, but I think the easiest way to put it right now is you feel like you have a play, and then you give up a goal, another one, a breakaway … we’ve gotta play smarter. We’ve got to keep the puck out of the net first and then the transition is gonna come,” said Mats Zuccarello, who had two assists.
Playing its final contest of a three-game homestand, in which it won just once, Minnesota is six points out of the final Western Conference playoff spot, a gap Wild players know could increase during their time off.
“Never know when you get a hot streak or we find something to put a lot of games together or play massively better the next games. So we’ll see what happens,” Gustavsson said.
Minnesota had the first 14 shots of the second period and appeared to take a 3-1 lead early in a mostly dominant frame, but the Ducks took their timeout before challenging that a Wild player was offside. After a lengthy video review the officials agreed.
“That was big,” Anaheim coach Greg Cronin said. “Brett Ferguson is our video guy and he called it right away. We couldn’t get a good angle from the bench, there were a number of different angles, but he was really confident the angle he had showed it.”
UP NEXT
Ducks: Host San Jose on Wednesday night.
Wild: At Chicago on Feb. 7.
